MICHAEL TOTTEN REPORTS on Israel’s other rocket war, with lots of photos.

AMERICA: More like Sweden than you thought!

PRAISE for Tom Lantos.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: The “secret hold” story has provided an irresistible news hook.

It’s a sign of just how hot an issue pork-barrel spending has become that the biggest game in political Washington this summer is trying to smoke out the senator who is blocking a bill to create a searchable database of federal contracts and grants.

The bill has the support of the Bush administration and activists on widely divergent sides of the political spectrum. It also passed a Senate committee without any objections, so the unknown senator is annoying many people. . . .

Now Porkbusters.org, a Web site dedicated to exposing wasteful government spending, is conducting a public campaign to smoke out the obstructor or obstructors, while blogs on both sides of the political spectrum have weighed in, demanding action on the bill. Mr. Frist has also vowed to get into the act, promising to try to pass the bill again when Congress returns from its break next month.

“For reasons of policy and politics, many bloggers are rightly outraged that S. 2590 was shot down when I attempted to bring it up for a vote prior to the August recess,” Mr. Frist wrote in an entry last week on the blog of Volpac, his political action committee.

Thanks, anonymous Senator!

UPDATE: More here:

The hunt for the senator is turning into a classic political “whodunit,” said Brian Darling, director of senate relations for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative leaning think tank based in Washington.

It could be anyone — Democrat or Republican — Darling said. To place a hold, senators merely have to inform their leader that they don’t want the legislation to move forward, he said.

It remains unclear if the senator responsible will be able to withstand the pressure from the broad array of groups and senators supporting the bill.

Why would a senator be against a database that makes it easy to track what companies are awarded grants, procurement contracts, loans, insurance and financial assistance?

“Somebody has something to hide,” said Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a new Washington-based nonprofit devoted to helping the public understand Congress through the Internet.

Gee do you think? And still more here:

The same Senate rules prohibit those party leaders from disclosing which of them did this dirty deed, and at which senator’s behest. It’s treated like classified information.

It’s troubling enough that Congress functions like this. All the worse is that this is such an important bill that serves the pubic interest. That some would stoop to such depths in opposition to government transparency can only suggests that the awarding of the government contracts and grants the database would track is even more corrupt than anyone had suspected.

It does.

ROD LIDDLE in the (London) Times:

Quick, somebody buy a wreath. Last week marked the passing of multiculturalism as official government doctrine. No longer will opponents of this corrosive and divisive creed be silenced simply by the massed Pavlovian ovine accusation: “Racist!” Better still, the very people who foisted multiculturalism upon the country are the ones who have decided that it has now outlived its usefulness — that is, the political left. It is amazing how a few by-election shocks and some madmen with explosive backpacks can concentrate the mind. . . . This is how far we have come in the past year or so. When an ICM poll of Britain’s Muslims in February this year revealed that some 40% (that is, about 800,000 people) wished to see Islamic law introduced in parts of Britain, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality responded by saying that they should therefore pack their bags and clear off. Sir Trevor Phillips’s exact words were these: ‘If you want to have laws decided in another way, you have to live somewhere else.’

I think we’ll see more of that.

“THANK YOU, WAL-MART!” Wait, I thought that when Wal-Mart forced Coke to make its product healthier that was a bad thing, and a sign of its evil monopsony power . . . .

IT’S MY BIRTHDAY, so blogging has been light as we’ve engaged in various family activities. It’s likely to remain so, but if you’re bored, note that GayPatriot is livepodcasting the Emmy awards.

CONVERTED TO ISLAM AT GUNPOINT: It’s not a religious war to us, but it is to them. More here.

Much, much more here. Plus this: “I’m glad these guys are safe and free. I wish them well. But I hope there will be some attention paid by Fox and other media to the way in which kidnappings and similar threats coerce and intimidate journalists, and may influence their coverage.”

RICHARD ARMITAGE WAS THE ORIGINAL PLAME LEAKER, according to the new book by David Corn and Michael Isikoff.

UPDATE: Tom Maguire, unsurprisingly, has thoughts. And there’s lots of discussion at The Corner, too — just keep scrolling.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A Tom Cruise Plamegate connection?

Meanwhile, Cruise has been busier pushing Scientology than anyone knew. According to a just-declassified State Department schedule, Cruise visited then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage on June 13, 2003, just an hour after Armitage had met with Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. (It’s speculated that Armitage outed Valerie Plame as a CIA spy at that meeting.)

Cruise was accompanied by Tom Davis, head of the L.A. Celebrity Center for Scientology, and Kurt Weiland, Scientology’s veep of communications.

What was discussed? “Only Armitage can answer that question, and he’s no longer here,” a State Department spokesman told us. E-mails to Armitage and Cruise’s rep weren’t answered, nor was a call to Scientology headquarters.

Forget 9/11, here’s some real conspiracy-theory material.

SCALZI WINS: Reader Darin Briskman emailed last night, after I went to bed: “I am live at the Hugo awards ceremony in Anaheim. I thought you’s like to know that John Scalzi just won the Campbell Award for best new Science Fiction and Fantasy Author.”

You can hear our podcast interview with Scalzi here if you’re interested. Can we spot talent, or what?

THE ORANGE REVOLUTION’S AFTERMATH: Robert Mayer of PubliusPundit is reporting from Ukraine and Belarus.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Ed Feulner writes:

The bill would require the Office of Management and Budget to build an easy-to-use Web database containing detailed information about all the grants and contracts the federal government hands out. This database would allow virtually anyone to see how much money a federal program received and how it spent that money. And, to ensure that public oversight is timely, information about spending would, by law, have to be posted within 30 days of when Congress authorized the money.

“It shouldn’t matter if you think government ought to spend more money or less money,” Obama says. “We can all agree that government ought to spend money efficiently. If government money can’t withstand public scrutiny, then it shouldn’t be spent.”

That makes perfect sense to most people. That’s why the bill has 29 co-sponsors, including staunch liberals, determined conservatives and self-professed moderates. Small wonder it’s moved through the legislative process at what amounts to lightning speed.

The bill was introduced in early April and has already been passed by a committee (the step in the process where senators usually bottle up controversial bills) and placed on the Senate’s legislative calendar.

But one senator doesn’t like it. And that may be enough to derail it, because he (or she) has put a hold on it. A secret hold. How’s that for irony — a secret hold on an open-government bill?

It may not stay that way for long, though. The watchdog group Porkbusters (www.porkbusters.org) is trying to smoke out the offender. It’s urging constituents to call their senators and push them to disavow the hold. Senators who go on record against the hold are “removed from the suspect list.”

Sen. Obama and I disagree on many things. But he’s right about this. The U.S. needs more openness in government, so anyone and everyone can review how Uncle Sam spends our tax money. Good government shouldn’t be held hostage by secret holds.

Lawmakers have the right — indeed, the responsibility — to block legislation they consider bad. But they should always do so publicly, identifying themselves and explaining their actions.

Indeed.

TIM BLAIR: “I’m not religious, so I don’t have a God in this fight, but I’d sure like to read a ‘short, wicked and witty’ book by Robyn Williams exposing all the scientific flaws in fundamentalist Islam (and the ABC’s aggressive promotion of that book).”

A PHILADELPHIA QUAGMIRE? Stop the killing. U.S. out of Philadelphia now!

UPDATE: Iraq veteran Chris Seamans isn’t impressed with the analysis in the Post article:

Among my other duties in Iraq, I was a convoy gunner. I am also a native of inner city Philadelphia who has spent almost all of my life in some of the city’s toughest neighborhoods. I can say from direct experience that combat duty in Iraq isn’t as easy or as safe as walking down the street in Philadelphia. This is a simple fact that the statistics you’ve linked to attempt to obfuscate. The statistics don’t take into account the fact that the majority of servicemen in Iraq spend their deployments behind rows of T-walls, Hesco barriers, and checkpoints, and that the much smaller number of troops that spend their time outside the wire face far greater danger than young black men walking the streets of Philly. The statistics also ignore the fact that the American military has some of the best trauma care in the world, and that the number of people who live despite grave injuries vastly outnumbers those who die from them. (If I remember correctly, the Army said a little while ago that the number of deaths in Iraq would be four times greater if not for its ability to quickly evacuate casualties to top quality medical facilities.) This means that a lot more soldiers have faced potentially life-threatening injuries than just those who have died. If the proper statistics were referenced (or even available) I’d bet my next paycheck that they would back up the obvious reality: Iraq is a warzone that is vastly more dangerous than even the deadliest sections of Philadelphia.

Jeez, you figure when you read something positive about the war in the Big Media it’s probably true. Oh, well.

But read this post from Dean Esmay, which seems about right.

ANTOTHER UPDATE: A response to Chris Seamans here:

No one is trying to say that Philadelphia is “more dangerous” than Iraq. (Well, okay, I’m sure someone somewhere is. But I’m not, Glenn Reynolds wasn’t, and the Washington Post article didn’t…)

Let me repeat: The point wasn’t that Philadelphia is “more dangerous” than Iraq. The point was that the death rate in Philadelphia among black men was 11% higher in 2002 than it was in Iraq among US troops during the first three years of the campaign. For the purposes of the point at hand, the statistics referenced were, indeed, the “proper” ones and they’re very clear.

I think that nearly everyone realizes that Iraq is far, far more dangerous than Philadelphia. But let’s not pretend that it’s more dangerous than it is. The statistics show how many people died in Iraq and they showed how many black men died in Philadelphia.

The ultimate point is that the numbers, when compared to each other, will probably surprise you.

Yes, by historical standards the war in Iraq isn’t terribly bloody, which does tend to get lost in the media coverage.

ROY BERENDSOHN:

Let me see if I’ve got this right. The price of all types of fuel is headed toward historically high levels. So how do we respond in this country? What are we doing, at least on principle, to cut our fuel consumption? Cranking up the AC.

I’ve never spent a summer as cold as this one. Everywhere I go, I find air conditioners running at full blast. Now, I’ve got nothing against air conditioning. But have you stepped inside an office building, train, restaurant, airport, house of worship, school, or doctor’s office lately? I rode on a train the other day that was, from one end to the other, nothing more than a rolling meat locker.

I think that air-conditioning is one of the great inventions of Western civilization. But I agree that over-airconditioning is rife, though it actually seems to me that things have been better this summer than last.

A LOOK AT JOHN MCCAIN’S somewhat iffy record on gun rights. This is a big problem for him.

IT’S LIKELY TO BE “HURRICANE ERNESTO” NOW: Brendan Loy has a roundup.

UPDATE: Jeez, I fixed an error above almost immediately, but not before Brendan saw it.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I was just a little bit ahead of the news cycle — Ernesto’s a full-fledged hurricane now.

SPACE TOURISM UPDATE: “Anousheh Ansari, a U.S. citizen of Iranian origin, will become the world’s first female space tourist when she blasts off aboard a Russian rocket on September 14, the launch company said on Friday.”

FAUXTOGRAPHY AND OTHER JOURNALISTIC FAKERY, discussed by me, Charles Johnson, and Dean Barnett, in the latest TCS Daily podcast.

A SHOCKING KATRINA PHOTO has been released.

HOW LIKELY ARE YOU TO DIE WHILE SERVING IN IRAQ? About half as likely as Americans back home, reports the Washington Post. Yeah, there are some caveats — read the whole thing — but it’s hard to look at these numbers and see the catastrophe that the “527 media” are proclaiming. The Belmont Club has much more discussion.

UPDATE: But see this post.

UH OH: “A landmark scientific report that was supposed to bridge the gap between proponents and opponents of human embryonic stem cell research has become the focus of an escalating feud, with a prominent critic of the research alleging that scientists were deceptive in presenting their results.”

HOWARD MORTMAN NOTES A GROUNDSWELL: “If only Teddy Roosevelt had appeared on Comedy Central.”

WHAT CONGRESS WILL LOOK LIKE, if the Democrats win a majority.

ORIN KERR looks at the group dynamics of mass unsolicited email lists.