CHRIS LYNCH WRITES that Bill Clinton doesn’t understand the new media.

NOT MUCH LIKE THE MINUTEMEN: Notwithstanding Michael Moore’s comparisons.

VARIFRANK has some interesting thoughts on China, Russia, and North Korea.

JEFF JARVIS: “We pay attention to big numbers. And whose fault is that? Media’s, first and foremost.”

Even in the area of reporting about blogs, I’ve noticed this tendency: Journalists want biggests and mosts. They want the blogs with big traffic, and they want to talk about big stories like Rathergate. But there’s a good argument that blogs with small traffic matter more in the aggregate — because they’re read by people who know the author personally and thus care more about what he/she says — and I agree with something Duncan Black once said that the real impact of blogs isn’t big stories, but ongoing posting on topics that interest the authors. If you focus on big numbers, you often miss the real stories.

CANADIAN JUSTICE: “Steal big, risk little.”

JIMMY CARTER and James Baker recommend photo IDs for voting. This seems reasonable to me. I can’t buy a beer — even though I’m clearly over 21 — without a photo ID. I think we should dye people’s fingers purple, too, to prevent revoting.

Some people complain, but I don’t see a way around Will Wilkinson’s point that allowing unentitled voters to vote is just as bad as barring entitled people: “The strange thing is that the press seems to treat illegitimate votes as a kind of noise, a kind of tolerable if unfortunate democratic static, while intimidated no-shows are a travesty against all that is holy. Yet, and this should be obvious, in terms of the aggregative democratic procedure, an unnoticed illegal vote for one guy (in a two horse race) is EXACTLY EQUIVALENT to scaring off a voter for the other guy.”

“NOW HE STARTS PAYING ATTENTION!” Brendan Loy on Ray Nagin’s decision to give up on reopening New Orleans this week.

I’VE ALREADY POSTED MY PORKBUSTERS CONTRIBUTION, but I notice that Michael Silence has rounded up quite a few local pork projects, including mine. I hope that other newpapers and newspaper blogs will pick this up, and follow through by interviewing members of Congress.

UPDATE: Reader Chris Whittaker emails:

I just reviewed the Tennessee portion of the highway bill, and even being generous by assuming that anything having to do with roads was a valid project, here is a conservative pork estimate of what I found, with project numbers included:

Greenways (Pork)- $8.35 million
Project Nos. 66, 3429, 4953, 4977

Bikes and Trails (Pork)- $17.912 million
Project Nos. 97, 268, 339, 355, 463, 627, 828, 1135, 1832, 2440, 2567, 3252, 3267, 4955, 4958

Transportation Heritage Museums (Pork)- $1.808 million
Project Nos. 1038, 2411, 4975, 391

Miscellaneous (ex. walkways, visitors centers, interpretive centers, Trail of Tears museum)- $19.6 million Project Nos. 1517, 2154, 2212, 4926, 4927, 4933, 4937, 4938, 4949, 4952

TOTAL TENNESSEE PORK: $47.67 million dollars…, Blogosphere 1, DeLay 0, ADVANTAGE: Blogosphere.

Sorry, Tom.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A different Chris, Chris Nolan, thinks this whole effort is wrong:

It’s also an extension of the attitude that got us and everyone in New Orleans into this mess in the first place.

I don’t think so. As we’ve seen, money that might have shored up the levees was diverted to . . . pork! (“‘Our politicians never cared half as much about protecting us as they cared about pork,’ Dashiell said.”)

She does offer up the argument that one person’s pork is another’s vital spending. Well, sometimes. Citizens Against Government Waste takes a procedural stance:

Q: This project sounds worthy. Why do you insist on calling it pork?

A: The pork label is a result of how a project receives funding and is not a subjective judgment of a project’s worth.

While CAGW is not judging the merit of projects included in our Pig Book, the point remains that many of these projects are local projects. If a local project receives federal funding it should be acquired through the federal competitive system.

If members of Congress insist on skirting the rules to get funding for a project, even for a seemingly important project, the resulting breakdown in accountability throws open the door to almost any kind of project. So while taxpayers may enjoy a local bridge or school renovation, they will also be paying for hundreds of egregious projects from which they will never benefit, such as screwworm research or a tattoo removal program four states away.

I tend to think that things that are obviously local — civic centers, pedestrian bridges, etc. — shouldn’t be done by the feds. Things that aren’t about, say, highways — like money for methamphetamine busts — shouldn’t be in highway bills. Etc. Yeah, some of these might conceivably be worthy, but I’m skeptical and I think the burden is on their proponents to demonstrate their worthiness.

Oh, well. There’s room to disagree on this, but I don’t really think that Chris Nolan is siding with Tom Delay here. Am I wrong?

CLIFF MAY:

579. That’s the current death toll in Louisiana from the hurricane and catastrophic flooding. Terrible for the victims, their family, their friends.

But also much less than the 10,000 widely predicted.

And, BTW, much less than the more than 35,000 killed by a heat wave in Europe two summers ago.

You recall the debate that set off about European heartlessness, racism and discrimination? No, neither do I.

Me neither.

UPDATE: More on that here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Some history for Bill Clinton.

PORK REPORTS is a new blog that’s all about pork.

BLOGGERS BUST A KATRINA MYTH: NBC / MSNBC retracts.

I believe it all started here.

“ANYBODY CAN DO THIS STUFF:” Hey, I prove that every day!

SEEKING SECOND AMENDMENT PLAINTIFFS in New Orleans.

WHAT HATH ROVE WROUGHT:

Fifty-seven percent (57%) of black voters support the federal reconstruction spending while just 17% are opposed. Among white voters, 49% favor the spending and 29% are opposed. This is the first Bush Administration proposal [t]hat has attracted more support from black Americans than from white Americans.

Hmm. (Via Newsbusters).

POPULAR MECHANICS is liveblogging from NASA HQ as the new “return to the Moon” plan is announced.

IT’S Talk Like a Pirate Day!

AUSTIN BAY IS SKEPTICAL of the new North Korea agreement.

BILL ROGGIO notes the Taliban’s impotence in the face of Afghan elections.

TOUR THE INDIAN BLOGOSPHERE: The latest Blog Mela is up!

I FINISHED GREG BEAR’S Dead Lines : A Novel of Life . . . After Death last night and I’ll never look at my cellphone the same way.

I liked it — it was like Tim Powers meets Charles Stross or something.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: As of the moment, over $13 billion in pork projects have been listed by bloggers over at the PorkBusters page. (Take that, Tom Delay!)

But remember — follow-through is everything here. Don’t just list your project: Call your Senators and Representative and ask them what to do about it, then post their responses on your blog, and link ’em at the PorkBusters page.

When you do that, send me a link to your post with the subject line “Pork Response” and I’ll link it.

(PorkBusters background here, in case you missed it.)

THIS ARTICLE FROM THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR focuses on something I mentioned earlier — whether Bush wants to repeal the Posse Comitatus Act.

I think that would be a very bad idea: Threatening freedom at home, while shifting the military’s focus from winning wars to disaster response.

HOWARD KURTZ is slamming the media so hard that he almost sounds like a blogger!

The fact that most of those left behind in the New Orleans flood were poor and black is being treated by the press as a stunning revelation–“A National Shame,” as Newsweek’s cover put it.

But not exactly a national secret. . . .

This is not a story, like whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, that was difficult to get at. But journalists rarely venture into impoverished neighborhoods these days, except for quick-hit features. When a woman from one of these communities goes missing, it doesn’t attain the status of a Natalee Holloway drama. . . .

The media have had a fine old time ridiculing Michael Brown, who quit last week as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as a former Arabian horse expert with no background for the job. And as The Post reported, five of the agency’s top eight officials came to their posts with virtually no experience in handling disasters. But why did journalists never get around to pointing this out in the past? Why are agencies such as FEMA never covered until disaster strikes?

Preach it, brother Howard. I’d like to see people explore why New Orleans hasn’t shared in the prosperity that we’ve seen in other big Southern cities. Political corruption — another undercovered story — probably has a lot to do with it.

Meanwhile, Bush in a Tree thinks that this will reinvigorate John Edwards’ presidential hopes.

BROCK VS. VAN STEENWYK: No contest.

NOT-SO-LOVELY RITA: Stormtrack notes the path for Tropical Storm Rita may take it over New Orleans as a hurricane.

Yet another reason not to rush people back in, as Mayor Nagin seems to want to do.

UPDATE: More on the rush to reopen New Orleans here.