ROGER SIMON:

Andrew Marcus (with video camera), Juliette Ochieng (aka baldilocks) and I will be covering the immigration demonstration in LA tomorrow for Pajamas Media. If you are a blogger or just a concerned citizen who would like to help us, we will be rendezvousing in the lobby of the New Otani Hotel (120 S. Los Angeles St.) at 8:30AM. Bring your digital camera and/or tape recorder. Spanish speakers especially welcome.

And let me know what you find.

STRATEGYPAGE REPORTS THAT AL QAEDA, despite powerful allies, is being defeated by the Internet.

ETERNAL VIGILANCE IS THE PRICE OF HEALTH:

Or, in the case of the mumps, which is now tearing through the heartland for the first time in decades, nine plane rides away. That’s how many connecting flights it took for just two infected airline passengers, one flying out of Arizona, the other from Iowa, to apparently kick-start a new eight-state epidemic that has so far sickened 1,165 people. The outbreak serves as a grim reminder that vaccines aren’t perfect and that despite modern medicine’s advances, germs commonly associated with the early 20th century are still very much in the world. Right now several of the mustiest-sounding diseases—whooping cough, anyone?—are spiking again. “When fewer people start getting diagnosed, there’s a premature declaration of victory,” says Kenneth Castro, of the CDC. “Then we let our guard down, and the diseases come back and bite us.” . . .

As if they didn’t have their hands full with mumps and whooping cough, doctors are also starting to worry about other blasts from the past. National statistics haven’t been collected, but many papers in the medical literature argue that rickets—a vitamin deficiency long thought to be a relic of the 19th century—is increasing among African-American and Hispanic kids, particularly in the North. Doctors blame it on everything from an increase in breast-feeding (breast milk doesn’t contain much vitamin D) to the overuse of sunscreen (the body needs ultraviolet light to produce the vitamin). Another vintage ailment, scarlet fever, the scourge of “Little Women” and “The Velveteen Rabbit,” though easily treatable with antibiotics now, also endures. It infects hundreds of kids each year, but pediatricians will usually say those kids have “a symptom of strep throat,” not scarlet fever, if only so as not to scare the parents. Finally, though tuberculosis is at a record low, a nasty drug-resistant strain has emerged. Seems like old times.

Related item here.

BETTER ALL THE TIME, The Speculist’s regular roundup of (mostly) technological good news, has been posted. Check it out.

BOB HERBERT gets repetitious.

GERARD VAN DER LEUN on United 93: “The film I saw by myself tonight expands that meaning and brings a human face to the acts by the passengers of United 93 that endure only in that rare atmosphere that heroes inhabit. What I know in my heart, but what always escapes my understanding until something like this film renews it, is that heroism is a virtue that most often appears among us not descending from some mythic pantheon, but rising up out of the ordinary earth and ordinary hearts when the moment calls for actions extraordinary.”

I also like what Wesley Mullins wrote:

The film also refuses to use hindsight in determining which facts to emphasize and has total ambivalence for the cultural impact of some people/events. No special significance is given to Beamer’s “let’s roll” direction that became a rallying cry for America and no reference is made to the group being lead by a hulkish homosexual who helped redefine the image of effeminate gays in a pre-Brokeback world. Even though those have been two important stories to come from Flight 93, nobody on the flight that day knew it…so the film doesn`t revise reality to acknowledge them.

The brilliance of a film like this can be understood by comparing it to the film many would have made instead. A lesser film would have Brad Pitt or Eric Bana playing Mark Bingham and Matt Damon or Tom Cruise playing Todd Beamer. The action would have slowed for the characters to capture the focus of the audience and build cliched subplots about lifelong struggles to overcome adversity. Their final rush to glory would have been a moment of catharsis, as they were able to overcome some fault that haunted them for years.

Thankfully, “United 93” is not that film. It is an unflinching, unromanticized account of the events of 9/11.

More at ShrinkWrapped and The American Thinker.

JOHN HINDERAKER looks at conflicts of interest and the New York Times.

DARFUR UPDATE: On the way home from the studio I passed a big Darfur rally, starting in front of the synagogue and continuing quite some distance down Kingston Pike. I don’t know how many people were there, but it was certainly more than I’ve seen at any antiwar protests in Knoxville.

Those are going on all over the place, with support from people like George Clooney. I’m happy to see it, but I agree with Tim Cavanaugh’s point:

I don’t want to make the umpteenth cheap shot about Hollywood stars and their political campaigns. I think military intervention in Darfur is a non-starter, and I’m glad about that. But what’s the clear categorical distinction between intervening in Iraq (which I think it’s fair to say Clooney and many other Darfur hawks opposed) and this one? Why does it always seem like progressives support any intervention that clearly does not advance any American interests?

Why, indeed?

UPDATE: Jose Guardia emails: “Yeah, it’s great that some people are marching against the genocide in Darfur; and no, I can’t understand either why for them for them it’s OK to intervene militarily in Darfur and it wasn’t in Iraq. Anyway, just wait until -if- Bu$Hitler starts making plans for an intervention. You’ll see how fast they start chanting ‘No War.'”

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: This Washington Post piece on pork says that the PorkBusters approach is wrong:

Congress often seems to have devolved into a policy-free zone, where pork not only greases the wheels of legislation, but is the very purpose of legislation. Last year’s energy bill, enacted the same day as the transportation bill, did not reduce high gas prices or U.S. dependence on foreign oil, but it did shower billions of dollars on well-connected energy firms.

As former GOP Senate aide Winslow T. Wheeler detailed in his legislate-and-tell book “The Wastrels of Defense,” Congress even turned its post-Sept. 11, 2001, military bills into receptacles for pork, including gyms, chapels, parking garages and museums. “What was once a predictable but part-time activity has become a full-time preoccupation that permeates Congress’s activities and decision-making processes,” Wheeler wrote.

Egregious earmarks are certainly a symptom of this phenomenon, such as the largesse that Cunningham stashed into military bills for a contractor who bribed him and the economically and environmentally dubious water projects that the Army Corps of Engineers was building in Louisiana when it should have been protecting New Orleans. That’s why some proposed earmark reform makes sense, especially rules that would identify their source, require votes on them and prevent them from slipping into huge bills at the last minute.

But it is hard to see how preventing individual members of Congress from proposing individual measures — even measures designed to benefit their constituents or contributors — would serve the cause of democracy.

I think the key here is transparency. If wide attention weren’t bad for pork-related efforts, Congress wouldn’t try so hard to hide them.

I’M SCHEDULED TO BE ON RELIABLE SOURCES TODAY, about 10:30 Eastern, talking about various events in the news.

UPDATE: Ian Schwartz has the video.

AS I PREDICTED, Bill Hobbs’ defenestration has made him more of a thorn in the side of Tennessee’s political establishment, rather than less.

THE CLEARSTREAM SCANDAL IN FRANCE is threatening to overflow its banks.

A GUIDE TO VIDEOBLOGGING, via Hot Air.

A LOOK AT OIL PROFITEERING:

“From 1986 to 2003, using 2004 dollars, the real national annual average price for gasoline, including taxes, generally has been below $2 per gallon,” noted the Federal Trade Commission in a 2005 report absolving the industry of collusion. “By contrast, between 1919 and 1985, real national annual average retail gasoline prices were above $2 per gallon more often than not.”

In other words, gasoline prices were lower than at anytime since 1919 for much of recent history. Some conspiracy! Maybe somebody should have been investigating consumers for “gouging” the oil companies.

And just who is the profiteer here? While the average profit on the sale of a gallon of gasoline is nine cents, the average state and federal tax on that same gallon of gasoline is about 45 cents (and 52 cents in Michigan). And if we must have an investigation, how about investigating the extent to which government regulations drive up prices and block new production?

Management guru Peter Drucker once remarked, with his usual drollery, that profit is “whatever government lets a company keep.” But most folks have a vastly inflated view of corporate profits. One regular survey of Americans found that the majority believes the average corporate profit is between 30 percent and 40 percent of sales, while the real figure is closer to 4 percent.

Washington should cool its carburetors. The pursuit of profit is one of the main engines of Western progress and prosperity. And as people in my neck of the woods are fast learning, it is only out of profit that we can afford to pay for a comfortable retirement. As profits in the steel, airline and auto industries erode or even vanish, so do pensions and health care benefits, not to mention jobs.

(Via NewsAlert). Yes. As I’ve noted before, a lot of the people commenting on this stuff need some remedial education.

VARIFRANK ON UNITED 93:

I stopped living the “road warrior” life in 2000. In my time as a road warrior, I have witnessed passengers in the midst of a psychotic episode being subdued by the crew as the person tried to open the door in flight. I’ve missed other flights that have crashed, killing other co-workers, but nothing has effected me like the story of United 93. To me, it is not an abstract story of other peoples suffering. It is the sense of guilt that comes from the surviving of it all that eats at my soul.

United Flight 93 claimed the lives of several of my company’s employees. They were people just like me, who were doing business one day and returning home the next, doing by air what most people do with the crosstown bus. But for a small change in my career decisions and personal desires during the preceding 12 months before 9/11/01; one of the September 11th flights might very well have been a flight that, I too, would have been on and most certainly would have died like all the others. I cannot look at any pictures from that day without thinking, “it could’ve been me on that plane”. Its very unsettling to see your potential death scene replayed over and over.

I once missed a flight that a co-worker had managed to catch, on which he was later killed. Yes, that event bothers me too, but September 11th is something else altogether. . . .

I do not know yet if I can go into a theater this weekend and watch a movie like United 93, but I do know that whether I choose at this point to see the movie or not, I will be buying a ticket to ensure that the legacy of that story is given the respect that it deserves by popular culture.

Read the whole thing. The audience reviews sound a similar note — see especially Mark Whittington’s review.

CIRCUMCISION FOR AIDS PREVENTION? I remember seeing studies on this over a decade ago; apparently it’s panning out.

THE LIMITS OF TECHNOLOGY: In light of my video appearance at the Harvard blog conference yesterday, some people are asking if I think that videoconferencing will replace in-the-flesh presentations at academic conferences. In a word, no.

I very much appreciate the conference organizers letting me do it that way, because I just couldn’t make the trip. But for me — and, I suspect, for the people at the other end — it was a distinct second-best. The fun of conferences is meeting people and schmoozing, and I missed out on that. And my delivery was probably off: I like to get direct feedback by watching the audience, and though there was a two-way camera hookup, the camera was facing the stage, meaning that I got to see a somewhat unnerving image of me as a Big Giant Head (delayed by about a second due to two-way Internet latency) instead of the audience. It was nice that I could do it that way, and it was an interesting experience, but it was no substitute for being there.

UPDATE: On the other hand, I was spared this.

ERIN CHAPIN videoblogs a burlesque show.

PODCAST-O-RAMA: Bill Frist is answering listener questions, including one, from Matoko Kusanagi, about his remarks on avian flu on one of our podcasts.

Plus, Atlas Vlogs!

RANDY NEAL (formerly SKBubba) offers an insider look at local TV news.

“EVERYTHING COULD EXPLODE AT ANY MOMENT:” Michael Totten reports from the Israeli / Lebanese border.

JOHN MCCAIN SEEMS TO BE taking his oath to defend the Constitution rather lightly.

GATEWAY PUNDIT looks at the Zawahiri video and wonders where he’s getting his talking points.

Sam Freedman looks at the Walt/Mearsheimer paper, and wonders where they’re getting their talking points.

BLOGGERS: “Digital Assassins?”

I thought that was a techno act.

JOHN HINDERAKER: “In quieter times, Latin America’s worsening political condition would have been a major concern. Now, it’s mostly overlooked, by the public, at least.”