IT’S KNOXVILLE’S DOGWOOD FESTIVAL: Lauren Spuhler, Erin Chapin, and Jigsha Desai offer a video report.

MY TCS DAILY COLUMN IS UP: It’s a response to Daniel Henninger’s dissing of the blogosphere last week.

GRAND ROUNDS IS UP!

STRATEGYPAGE:

This year, the PKK has been very active just across the border in Turkey and Iran, attacking police and army units. The Turks and Iranians are fighting back. There are already over 2,000 Turkish troops inside Iraq. This sort of presence has been tolerated for years, as long as the Turks were just looking for PKK camps in remote areas. But the Turks have over 50,000 troops on the border, and appear ready to expand their operations in northern Iraq. Meanwhile, to the east. Iranian troops are moving to the border, and Iranian artillery is being fired into Iraq, at areas believed occupied by the PKK.

The Kurdish government in northern Iraq basically tells the PKK, “you’re on your own.” But if the Turks and Iranians do serious damage to the PKK (by finding and destroying many of the PKK camps, which are often disguised as civilian villages), many of the PKK fighters will just flee to Kurdish government controlled areas and blend into the civilian population (the PKK gunmen don’t wear uniforms). This would tempt the Turks to just keep going. The Turkish army has been fighting, and defeating, Kurdish irregulars for centuries. No big deal. Many Turks believe that northern Iraq really belongs to Turkey (it was taken away from defeated Turkey after World War I, so that Turkey would not have access to the newly discovered oil in the area.) Iraq does not want to give up the north, but they cannot defeat Turkish troops. Only the U.S. can. For the moment, the Americans are telling the Turks to stick to hunting PKK, and forget about lost provinces. For the moment, anyway.

More on this at California Yankee. Given the Turks’ lack of support regarding our efforts in Iraq, I don’t see why we should be particularly supportive of their efforts. An Iranian invasion, meanwhile, would just be playing into Bush’s hands.

THE MCCARTHY STORY is getting more complicated.

AN ARMY OF HILTZIKS?

“PRO-TALIBAN SPEECH PROTECTED, criticisms of homosexuality unprotected.” Unless, I guess, you’re quoting the Taliban on homosexuality . . .

TERROR BOMBINGS IN EGYPT: I think this is more evidence of Al Qaeda’s shortened reach, and I suspect it’s not going to win many hearts and minds.

Big Pharaoh was not far away, and has some thoughts.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey also notices that Al Qaeda seems to be attacking Muslims more than Westerners.

DIVING DEEP to simulate space missions: A pretty cool report.

AIR-HYBRID ENGINES? There’s an air-hybrid blog, too.

SO I GUESS READING INSTAPUNDIT AT WORK IS OKAY:

Saying surfing the web is equivalent to reading a newspaper or talking on the phone, an administrative law judge has suggested that only a reprimand is appropriate as punishment for a city worker accused of failing to heed warnings to stay off the Internet.

Administrative Law Judge John Spooner reached his decision in the case of Toquir Choudhri, a 14-year veteran of the Department of Education who had been accused of ignoring supervisors who told him to stop browsing the Internet at work.

Frankly, we’d be better off if bureaucrats spent more time reading blogs, and less doing their jobs. . . .

InstaPundit — bringing on the revolution, one wasted hour at a time!

THREE MILLION DOWNLOADS for The Glenn and Helen Show since we started counting 13 episodes ago. If only we were getting 99 cents per download . . . .

UPDATE: Or, er, anything at all . . . .

DARFUR UPDATE: There will be a rally in DC on Sunday, April 30.

MICHAEL TOTTEN REPORTS on an experiment in journalism that has worked out pretty well — and on what’s coming next.

A MONTAGE OF TALKING-HEAD RESPONSES to the Mary McCarthy case, over at Hot Air.

UPDATE: A text roundup here.

And Stephen Spruiell says that media outfits are using a misleading frame to make it look as if the McCarthy story is connected to the Plame story. Hey, maybe she’s the Plame leaker! I mean, they’d know, right . . . ?

MORE DISENCHANTMENT WITH CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS, this time from Mark Steyn:

Christopher Hitchens said on the Hugh Hewitt show recently that he “dislikes” the Republican party but has “contempt” for the Democrats. I appreciate the distinction, though I’m not sure I could muster even that level of genial tolerance. . . .

But what happened to the other guys? “The Republican party,” says Arlen Specter, “is now principally moderate, if not liberal” — and he means it as a compliment. “I’ll just say this about the so-called porkbusters,” chips in Trent Lott. “I’m getting damn tired of hearing from them. They have been nothing but trouble since Katrina.”

Well, to be honest, I’m a good half-decade past getting damn tired of hearing from Trent Lott. But the difference is that, as a member of the pork-funding sector of the economy, I pay for him; he doesn’t pay for me.

He’s starting to sound like Bill Quick.

DANIEL GLOVER: “How deep is the partisan rancor in Congress? So deep that aides are bickering over who knows more about blogs.”

It’s even affecting Capitol Hill softball. Can’t we all just get along?

IN THE MAIL: Ramesh Ponnuru’s new book, The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life.

I’m pretty sure I’ll disagree with most of his analysis (like Scott Adams, I think I count as “pro-death”) but judging from the reviews that are already up, I think this will get a lot of play.

AVIAN FLU UPDATE: Dr. Henry Miller looks at prospects for a Bird Flu Manhattan Project. Meanwhile, Bill Frist’s current proposal gets a bad review.

HOWARD KURTZ has more on the Hiltzik affair. So does Jeff Jarvis, who writes: “I would not fire Hiltzik. He screwed up and made an ass of himself. That is punishment enough.” There’s some interesting discussion in the comments.

UPDATE: Patterico writes: “It’s not the pseudonyms, it’s the sock-puppetry!”

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: I think this is right:

It was only last month that the Senate staged a breast-beating debate about the need to control the rampant pork-spending abuse of earmarks — boondoggle appropriations tucked into vital legislation with little public scrutiny. Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, orated on the side of the angels in calling for reform. Well, the angels have lost another player. As the Senate returns from recess it will confront the year’s prize porker blithely trotted out by Senator Lott — a $700 million earmark to relocate a Gulf Coast rail line, which was just rebuilt, post-Katrina, at a cost of $250 million. . . .

Even worse, Senator Lott and his fellow Mississippi Republican, Thad Cochran, are attaching this frivolous add-on to a bill that is supposed to be used to pay for emergencies — specifically the war in Iraq and hurricane reconstruction.

Senator Lott angrily resents any description of his pet project as a right of way to the slot machines. He insists the rail line needs higher ground and his constituents better protection. But it seems clear the twin traumas of Iraq and Katrina are being used as cover. Economic development is a fine goal for the Gulf Coast, but it deserves careful consideration, not a devious rush to the pork barrel.

Indeed.

UPDATE: People who think that this kind of thing won’t matter to the GOP should read this post.

MICHELLE MALKIN has a new web video venture called Hot Air. The current episode is about China, Internet censorship, and the complicity of U.S. companies.

IF YOU WERE OFF having a life or something over the weekend, you missed our podcast interviews with Jim Dunnigan, Austin Bay, and the just-back-from-Iraq Michael Totten.

FORGET CLIMATE CHANGE: Now we’re warned about how technology is changing our brains.

JOHN FUND has the latest Yale Taliban developments.