LOU DOBBS loses his cool. Hey Lou, don’t go all Joy Behar on us!

JOSH MANCHESTER looks at the future of stateless war-fighting.

SEND IN THE SPACE MARINES!

MARK TAPSCOTT:

Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has cooked up with Public Citizen’s Joan Claybrook a “lobbying reform” that actually protects rich special interests and activists millionaires while clamping new shackles on citizens’ First Amendment rights to petition Congress and speak their minds.

Pelosi tried earlier this year to move H.R. 4682, the “Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2006,” which is now cited by Public Citizen’s Web site as the vehicle it is helping the incoming speaker to craft for the new Congress. The proposal Claybrook is helping craft for introduction early in 2007 is expected to be essentially the same bill Pelosi put forth this year.

That is bad news for the First Amendment and for preserving the kind of healthy, open debate that is essential to holding politicians, bureaucrats and special interests to account for their conduct of the public business.

The key provision of the 2006 bill was its redefinition of grassroots lobbying to include small citizens groups whose messages about Congress and public policy issues are directed toward the general public, according to attorneys for the Free Speech Coalition.

All informational and educational materials produced by such groups would have to be registered and reported on a quarterly basis. Failure to report would result in severe civil penalties (likely followed soon by criminal penalties as well).

Sounds bad to me. Read the whole thing.

A LOOK AT KOFI ANNAN’S MYSTERY APARTMENT, from Claudia Rosett. Nice to see New York helping the less fortunate.

AN ARMY OF TWO: “Brother, Sister join National Guard.”

ME AND ANDREW SULLIVAN, in Congressional testimony?

A LOOK AT POLICE REPORTING, in Iraq and America.

SANFORD LEVINSON:

One of the ill-concealed subtexts of my book Our Undemocratic Constitution is that my colleagues in the legal academy pay much too much attention to the rights-conferring parts of the Constitution (which are often exactly what Madison predicted they would be, “parchment barriers” that are all too permeable given the right degree of public panic and malleable judges) and too little attention to the “hard-wired” structural features that, I now believe, explain much more about the actualities of American politics than do the clauses that law professors fixate on.

Read the whole thing.

MY EARLIER SWISS ARMY KNIFE POST has produced a lot of emails saying things to the effect that, “That’s not a knife. Now this is a knife.” It’s also gotten a lot of email from people who say that the Leatherman is the way to go. I stand by my original reasoning.

My brother is a big Leatherman fan, but I’ve always been more a Swiss Army kind of guy. It’s a source of strain between us. . . . Well, jokes, anyway. Maybe one day I’ll compromise on the Gerber, or maybe one of these.

UPDATE: Reader Joshua Gitlitz emails that there’s no way my brother can top this.

BUT THEY SUPPORT THE TROOPS: “‘Peace’ Advocates Vandalize Cars at Army Recruiting Station.”

JAMIL HUSSEIN: Still a mystery, despite all the digging. I don’t see any way for this to reflect well on A.P., whose prize source remains unidentified.

JAMES KIRCHICK on Zimbabwe.

“You can’t go to Disney World and impersonate a Disney character. And yes, Santa is a Disney character… isn’t he?”

No.

IT’S ABOUT TIME: Marching to Mecca for gay rights!

AN ELECTORAL SETBACK FOR AHMADINEJAD, even though student protesters are in hiding from his thugs.

THE BLOGS VS. JOHN MCCAIN: I think that John McCain realizes that bloggers are unhappy with him over McCain-Feingold — he said as much in our podcast interview — but I don’t think he grasps just how unhappy, or how much this hurts him. I suspect that (at least some of) his staff does, though. But what can he do about it?

MICHAEL FUMENTO says that the avian flu threat is exaggerated. I certainly hope he’s right, but it’s worth pointing out that most preparations for avian flu will also be valuable in the event of other dangerous epidemics. And the argument that no such epidemics are likely in the next couple of decades seems to me to be rather weak. How would we know? It also seems hard to argue that we’re overprepared for disasters generally. So while short-term planning aimed specifically at avian flu may not be as important as we thought a couple of years ago, overall planning for public health (and other) emergencies is still in a sad state.

UPDATE: Fumento prefers this link to the version of the article with hyperlinks that’s on his website. He also stresses that he never meant to say that no epidemics are likely in coming decades — and I never meant to suggest that he did. Just to be clear on both points.

TEN YEARS IN PRISON for consensual oral sex between a 17-year-old and a 15-year old?

I agree with Eugene Volokh that this sounds unjust. What’s more, were the genders reversed I doubt that it would even have been prosecuted.

DUKE RAPE UPDATE:

In last Friday’s court session, Dr. Brian Meehan admitted that he and Mike Nifong entered into an agreement to intentionally exclude from his report any mention that DNA tests had discovered results from five unidentified males in the accuser’s rape kit.

Meehan also conceded that the decision reached by Nifong and him violated his company’s protocols. It also ran counter to the Supreme Court’s Brady decision and North Carolina’s Open Discovery law. The former requires the state to turn over all exculpatory evidence to the defense; the latter requires the prosecution to turn over all evidence to the defense.

Despite this revelation, there has been no sign that the North Carolina State Bar has abandoned its passive approach regarding Nifong’s misconduct. Meehan, however, might face a different fate.

His lab is accredited by the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors/Laboratory Accreditation Board (ASCLD/LAB). I emailed the board to ask if it planned to investigate Meehan’s accreditation status in light of Friday’s testimony.

Follow the link for more, and for that matter just visit K.C. Johnson’s blog and keep scrolling. Meanwhile, reader John Griffin emails: “Bet we hear, when all is said and done, that Mike Nifong has checked into a detox unit and blames his addiction to (fill in the blank) as the reason for his ‘irrational exuberance’ in the pursuit of the Duke students. Wonder what Duke’s President will offer up as an excuse.”

MORE THOUGHTS on force strength and structure. And read this post from Donald Sensing, too.

UPDATE: James Joyner weighs in.

BUT WE’RE WAY BEHIND ON HYPOCRISY PRODUCTION: E.U. vs. U.S.A. on CO₂.

JOHN FUND: Why Barack Obama may not run.

FIVE MACGYVER TRICKS FOR OUTDOOR SURVIVAL, plus an interview with Laurence Gonzalez, author of Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why.

NEWSWEEK reports that Iraq’s economy is booming. (“there’s a vibrancy at the grass roots that is invisible in most international coverage of Iraq.”) That’s old news for readers of StratgyPage, of course.