A BIG MARCH IN KNOXVILLE:

Up to 20,000 people turned out Saturday for a parade to welcome home the National Guard’s 278th Regimental Combat Team, providing a big-city atmosphere powered by small-town values. The rains that had been pelting the region ceased and the clouds gave way to bright sunshine for the two-hour Celebrate Freedom Parade 2006 through downtown Knoxville.

“What a great sight this is on the street today,” said Gov. Phil Bredesen as he reviewed the 2,500 members of the 278th standing in parade formation wearing their camouflage uniforms. As governor, Bredesen is commander of the Tennessee National Guard.

Bredesen said the men and women of the 278th who were deployed to Iraq for a year represent “what is the very best of our state and the very best of our nation.”

Nice to see something positive like this going on.

UPDATE: Praise for Phil Bredesen, and questions about why stuff like this gets so little attention.

MCCARTHY ON MCCARTHY: “Why isn’t she in handcuffs?”

CATHY SEIPP ON BLUE CROSS: “To decide after a therapy has proved beneficial that it’s merely ‘investigational’ and therefore should not be covered — that, actually, seems the definition of bad faith. . . . What I didn’t realize at the time was that I’d turn out to be my insurance company’s worst nightmare — the cancer patient who keeps responding to extremely expensive treatments. I only hope that Blue Cross doesn’t turn out to be mine.”

TOM MAGUIRE is looking into McCarthyism in the media.

DARFUR UPDATE: The trouble has spread to Chad, and StrategyPage has the latest:

While Sudan insists it did not support the Chad rebels, people who have traveled through the border area contradict this. The U.S. also says Sudan is involved (without revealing its sources, which probably include satellite surveillance and agents on the ground.) Sudan apparently believes that, if the faction it backed got control of Chad, the Darfur rebels would have one less place to hide out in. But some of the Darfur rebels belong to tribes that have branches in both Sudan and Chad. That said, Sudan’s brutal policy in Darfur doesn’t make sense either, but there it is. The Sudanese leadership are ruthless, and don’t much care how much mess and misery they create.

Indeed. Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden — who was already mad about the end to genocide in East Timor — is now declaring war against the world over efforts to end the genocide in Darfur. I agree that this is, if genuine, an agitprop error. But it’s hard to stay in touch with the currents of popular opinion when you live in a cave.

UPDATE: TigerHawk notes something that this dog isn’t barking about: “Apart from the list’s comic aspects, it is fascinating for its omissions. Why didn’t bin Laden talk about Iraq? Less than 2 1/2 years ago, al Qaeda broke the news to the Taliban that it was diverting resources to Iraq so as to humiliate the American ‘Crusaders.'”

I guess that didn’t work out so well.

ANOTHER UPDATE: In TigerHawk’s comments, Kai Carver says that Osama did talk about Iraq. I guess it just wasn’t seen as newsworthy. Hmm.

WE ARE HERE TO SAVE THE ERF! E. . . R. . . F!

BRENDAN LOY: “Proving once again that Australia is the new Florida, Cyclone Monica is threatening to make a second landfall — this time as a Category 5 cyclone.”

It’s now stronger than Katrina and Rita ever were.

SCOTT JOHNSON TO TIM RUTTEN: “I appreciate Rutten’s drawing attention to my condemnation of the Times and the Pulitzer Prize committee.”

THE WASHINGTON POST ASKS: “Who are the overlooked autocrats we should be paying attention to but aren’t?” It’s not a bad list, though Robert Mugabe should probably be on it. I guess he gets more attention than the folks listed, but he still doesn’t get nearly enough.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: This is pretty cool. In the Philadelphia Inquirer PorkBusters gets called “the most effective citizen-journalist watchdog movement in a generation.”

I don’t know about that — it sounds like a bit of an exaggeration — but it’s nice to hear. There’s no question that PorkBusters has gotten a fair amount of attention, and that politicians are at least embarrassed about pork.

PorkBusters has certainly irritated Trent Lott, which is some evidence of success, and there’s a report that earmarks are down 37% presumably as the result of public pressure.

That’s not bad for a project only a few months old, run by a couple of bloggers without a budget with help from other folks in the blogosphere. But it’s going to take more than this to make a real difference. Changing the psychology is the first step, and that’s happened. And, perhaps, we’ve even started to change behavior. But we need a lot more of that, and I suspect that structural changes will be needed, too.

Still, it’s always nice to be noticed.

MICKEY KAUS: New York Times Scammed by Clinton-Burkle Spin?

It’s a bad weekend for the Times.

IRAQ’S PARLIAMENT MEETS: Iraq the Model has it covered.

On the Pajamas Podcast, Eric Umansky and I agreed that this was the big story of the weekend, and it is — notwithstanding the CIA leak story, which is also big.

MARY MCCARTHY / CIA LEAK UPDATE:

There is no mention by the Post — none — that Mary McCarthy is a big Kerry campaign and Democratic Party contributor.

How can the WPost justify reporting one friend’s mere impression that McCarthy is not biased and that it is very difficult even for those who know her well to understand why she would leak sensitive information, and yet not report the objective fact that — after a meteoric professional rise in intelligence circles during a Democratic administration — McCarthy, while a government official on a government salary, gave at least $7700 of her own money in a single year to Democratic political campaigns?

Given the Post’s delicate posture in this case — having been the recipient of at least one highly sensitive leak on a subject about which it chose to publish a story damaging to national security — you would think they might perceive a special obligation to play it down the middle here. But apparently not.

This morning’s story is said to have had no fewer than eight contributors — it was written by R. Jeffrey Smith and Dafna Linzer, and lists as contributors Walter Pincus, Al Kamen, Howard Kurtz and Dan Morse, and research editor Lucy Shackelford and researcher Magda Jean-Louis.

Since campaign contribution information is available on-line — you don’t even need to draft star reporters and research editors to dig it out — is it too much to suppose that at least one of these eight folks might have mentioned, at least in passing, that this purported non-ideologue of a leaker was giving lots of money to the effort to unseat the present administration?

I’m pretty sure that similar evidence tying a leaker to the GOP under similar circumstances would get a lot of play.

Lots more at The Belmont Club — just keep scrolling.

I’M WATCHING ANYA KAMENETZ ON CNN, going on about how bad Generation X has it. Of course, CNN’s tear-jerking vignette was about a woman who ran up huge credit-card bills in college, which isn’t terribly heartbreaking. Seems like they’re going out of their way to paint a grim economic picture. More on this story here and here.

“IT WAS MY UNDERSTANDING that there would be no math.”

BILL HOBBS is blogging again.

BILL FRIST HAS A “GET TOUGH” COLUMN ON IMMIGRATION that more or less parallels what he said in our podcast interview. I suspect, however, that he’ll have trouble delivering legislation that’s equally tough.

AN ABSTINENCE-ONLY bait-and-switch from the Bush Administration? Jeez. Not that the “official” version wasn’t lame enough to begin with.

A PACK, NOT A HERD: “A passenger who claimed to have a bomb aboard a United Airlines flight was subdued by passengers as the California-bound plane was diverted to Denver International Airport, airport officials said.” Nice to see that people haven’t gotten slack since 9/11.

UPDATE: In a related development, Mary Katharine Ham reviews the Flight 93 movie.

GATEWAY PUNDIT has a roundup of the latest Iraqi political developments.

AN ARGUMENT FOR INTELLECTUAL DIVERSITY: “Mobbing” in academia. Fortunately, the Internet seems to serve as an effective antidote.

TIM WU ON REASONS TO SUPPORT NET NEUTRALITY: “The Network Neutrality debate is really a debate about what are, in effect, crown corporations, AT&T and Verizon, whose plans would distort private competition among internet service providers. Companies like AT&T are infrastructure providers, almost like the roads — and their plans are very much simple tollbooths placed on a utility necessary for the operation of the private market. That’s why I think even libertarians have reason to resist the incursions of a company like AT&T on the internet and its design.” Plus, you’re likely to see indirect — and hence less accountable — government regulation using monopolists as intermediaries. At least, that’s how it worked last time we had that kind of arrangement.

TOM MAGUIRE: “The NY Times seems to think the political contributions of the sacked CIA officer are significant, but their investigative skills are apparently a bit rusty, since they are about $7,500 light in their reporting.”

UPDATE: Lots of bloggers are jumping on this story: More here, here, and a big roundup here.

I’m pretty sure I know what the talk-radio folks will be talking about next week.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Still more here.

MORE: The coverage seems a bit warped:

If you want a good sense of where the media’s mind is in the wake of the Mary McCarthy story, check this out. . It’s an AP story about McCarthy’s firing. Guess whose picture is at the top? Not McCarthy. Not Dana Priest. Not anybody involved in the story at all, actually. It’s a picture of Scooter Libby — who’s not even mentioned in the article.

I won’t be surprised if they end up fixing it soon. But it’s there now.

So does that mean AP thinks McCarthy is the Plame source? . . .

MORE: A rather negative review of the New York Times’ defense of Mary McCarthy. [Defense? Aren’t they a neutral news source? — ed. No.]

STILL MORE: Chester invokes some literary cliches.

MORE ON PORK: “Earmark reform is now a hot topic: The online Porkbusters movement has raised awareness of it; the Senate has passed a version of earmark reform; President Bush even addressed the issue in his State of the Union. Boehner is turning up the pressure at exactly the right time. But he and Speaker Dennis Hastert need to do more if they want to revive this budget. They need to use their power on the House GOP Steering Committee — which hands out committee assignments — as leverage against Lewis: He needs to know that his chairmanship of the Appropriations Committee is at stake.”

UPDATE: Much more here.

WELL, DUH: The “culture of corruption” issue turns out to be bipartisan: “Rep. Alan B. Mollohan (W.Va.) stepped down temporarily from his post as ranking Democrat on the House ethics committee, amid accusations that he used his congressional position to funnel money to his own home-state foundations, possibly enriching himself in the process.”

Stuff like this just makes a third-party run more likely, I suspect.