HERE’S HOW TO PARTICIPATE ONLINE in today’s Milbloggers’ Conference in Washington, DC.

UPDATE: LaShawn Barber is liveblogging, and links to some others who are, too.

SCOTT OLIN SCHMIDT is pondering the Pelosi Revolution and seems pretty comfortable with the idea. Republicans beware! On the other hand, The Commissar sketches a darker vision of the future. With ugly t-shirts, to boot.

UPDATE: Questions for Republicans, here.

MORE ON THE CIA LEAKER: I suspect that we’ll see some other folks in the intelligence community losing their jobs, and possibly facing prosecution, over leaks as well, before this is all over.

UPDATE: A big roundup here, and a Scrappleface take here. And was the whole thing a sting operation?

MORE TO COME, I EXPECT: A CIA employee fired for leaking classified information.

PUBLIUS HAS THE LATEST on political developments within Iraq. I agree that this is probably more positioning before a final resolution — at least, that’s how it looks like to my inexpert eyes. (Though more and more Iraqi politics are looking like faculty politics with the addition of AK-47s and IEDs — which is not a good thing!)

Also, read this interesting dispatch from National Guardsman Arik Catron.

MY PAPER FOR THE HARVARD BLOG/SCHOLARSHIP CONFERENCE is now online. It’s called Libel in the Blogosphere: Some Preliminary Thoughts. It’s a preliminary draft, so comments and suggestions are welcome.

Other papers are also available, here.

MICHAEL TOTTEN has posted his final report from Iraq. Don’t miss the postscript!

REBECCA MACKINNON: “I am a big fan of Skype in general, and I use it heavily. But the way Skype chooses to treat its Chinese users will ultimately impact the extent to which I as a user can trust Skype anywhere, in general.”

Read the whole thing.

SAVETHEINTERNET.COM is a site dedicated to opposing a two-tiered Internet. I’m certainly against that, though I haven’t followed the twists and turns of this debate too closely.

UPDATE: A survey of the issue, from Dale Franks.

IN THE MAIL: Matthew Continetti’s The K Street Gang : The Rise and Fall of the Republican Machine.

I understand the logic of the “K Street strategy,” but I don’t see much in the way of actual results in passing Bush’s domestic agenda. Not positive results, anyway.

MUCH MORE ON THE HILTZIK STORY, from Howard Kurtz.

UPDATE: More from Cathy Seipp. And Hugh Hewitt is noting the contrast between L.A. Times editor John Carroll’s dismissive comments about the lower standards of the blogosphere, and, well, this. And Ace writes: “I’m going to pretend that this is the MOST IMPORTANT STORY OF THE ENTIRE YEAR, as the left did with Gannongate and l’affaire ‘The Nech.'”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Roger Simon is playing Freud with Hiltzik.

MARK TAPSCOTT has been writing editorials for the DC Examiner and posts links here.

Plus, he posts the Carnival of Cars. He’s been awfully busy for a guy who’s about to have tendon surgery.

BLOG WEEK IN REVIEW: Me, Eric Umansky, Tammy Bruce, and Austin Bay on the events of the week in a new podcast from PJ Media. Please give it a listen — and, when you’re done, fill out the survey.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER:

The Defense Department waves away the protesting generals as just a handful out of more than 8,000 now serving or retired. That seems to me too dismissive. These generals are no doubt correct in asserting that they have spoken to and speak on behalf of some retired and, even more important, some active-duty members of the military.

But that makes the generals’ revolt all the more egregious. The civilian leadership of the Pentagon is decided on Election Day, not by the secret whispering of generals.

We’ve always had discontented officers in every war and in every period of our history. But they rarely coalesce into factions. That happens in places such as Hussein’s Iraq, Pinochet’s Chile or your run-of-the-mill banana republic. And when it does, outsiders (including the United States) do their best to exploit it, seeking out the dissident factions to either stage a coup or force the government to change policy.

That kind of dissident party within the military is alien to America. Some other retired generals have found it necessary to rise to the defense of the administration. Will the rest of the generals, retired or serving, now have to declare which camp they belong to?

It is precisely this kind of division that our tradition of military deference to democratically elected civilian superiors was meant to prevent. Today it suits the antiwar left to applaud the rupture of that tradition. But it is a disturbing and very dangerous precedent that even the left will one day regret.

“Even?” I’d say “especially.” They’ve been pushing the idea that generals should run things, not their civilian superiors, and (with Kerry) the idea that only a combat veteran should be President. Yes, those are opportunistic slogans of the moment. But they’re still slogans. Do they really want that kind of a country?

UPDATE: Reader Rachel Walker emails:

I understand the right to dissent. Heck, it’s been my side’s rallying cry since it lost to Bush in the Supreme Court in 2000. But the logic of this dissent puts their train of thought far into the (dare I say it) fascist line of behavior, since they are basically calling for the military to control all things.

This is what contrarian arguing can end up doing – leading one into exactly what they did not intend to be. I had to learn the lesson that not every action equals a proper reaction.

Indeed.

UPDATE: Fred Schoeneman disagrees: “The precedent was already set, back when all those retired (and active duty) generals were bitching about ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’ And before that it was set by a General on active duty. His name was MacArthur, and he was a pro-war Republican.”

MacArthur was fired. And neither he, nor the generals who bitched about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” were treated kindly by the media. Indeed, they were treated as threats to Democracy and the American Way. Why is this different?

MICKEY KAUS: “Are you as suspicious as I am about the current well-publicized crackdown on employers of illegal immigrants?”

JONAH GOLDBERG accuses Al Gore of perpetrating a “green scare.”

THE NINTH CIRCUIT BLOWS IT ON THE FIRST AMENDMENT, according to this post by Eugene Volokh.

I’VE BEEN COMPLAINING ABOUT AIRPORT SECURITY for a long time. But it seems to still stink:

Increased airport security in the United States has been an expensive disaster that is turning a lot of otherwise law-abiding people into outlaws. But it’s worse than that. International travelers have noticed that airport security outside the United States, especially in Europe (the home of twenty million Moslems, and thousands of openly enthusiastic Islamic radicals), is much less grueling. Yet there have been no attempts to “take advantage” of this seemingly lax European airport security to hijack aircraft.

Many frequent flyers in the United States have found, by trial and error, ways to sneak forbidden materials (cigar clippers, knives, lighters) past the gate security. And the airport security people know that all their aggressive searches aren’t working. In the last two years, tests of airport security have shown that 60 percent of fake bombs get through. This was largely due to the fact that bombs can be taken apart, the pieces smuggled aboard, and then reassembled for use.

I don’t know why the Democrats haven’t made a political issue of this, since it’s got a ready-made constituency (everyone who travels by air). Are they just unwilling to attack a big, expensive government program?

HARDBALL, HILTZIK AND REUTERS: Lots of bad news for the media today, over at the Media Blog. But NBC’s embedded Baghdad blog gets a good review.

Plus, this: “As the famous saying goes, on the internet, no one knows you’re a dog. However – they will probably figure it out if you are a horse’s ass.”

UPDATE: Thoughts on Hiltzik from Patterico. And more here from Captain Ed.

HERE’S A NICE PIECE ON MILITARY BLOGGERS by Bryan Bender in The Boston Globe.

And don’t forget this week’s Milblog Conference in Washington D.C. on Saturday.

Related item here.

MARK STEYN ON HUGH HEWITT: Talking about the Hiltzik affair, Iran, and more. Transcript and audio here.

MORGAN SPURLOCK’S FILM, SUPER SIZE ME, may have saved McDonald’s! It’s like what Michael Moore did for George W. Bush . . . .

IRANIANS IN ADHAMIYA? Zeyad has a report. Whether or not Iranians were behind the gunfire, it’s interesting that so many Iraqis are saying so.

UPDATE: Though in Zeyad’s post someone says that the gunmen “came from Iran” (which seemed to me to go beyond the usual Shia=Iranian line often heard from Sunnis in Iraq), this post from Michael Yon says that the Iranian role is overstated. Of course, he’s still enroute back there, so this reflects his experience from earlier in the year. You should read the whole post anyway, though.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Tim Chapman writes:

You’ve got to hand it to some Republican appropriators. Despite swirling political winds that threaten to blow the GOP majority right out of town, they keep on keeping on.

Never mind the fact that the pungent stench from the Abramoff scandal still permeates the corridors of K Street and Capitol Hill. Never mind the fact that this scandal revealed the questionable practice of Congressional earmarking run amok. And never mind that it was only months ago that the Senate debate over the poster child of bad earmarking – the Alaskan Bridge to Nowhere – ignited a firestorm of criticism over the way Congress spends American tax dollars.

No, these considerations are a mere after thought – an annoyance – to many congressional appropriators who remain intent on bringing home the bacon, no matter what the cost. . . .

Now, the “emergency” spending issue is set to come before the Senate. Next week, when the Senate returns from its Easter recess, the chamber will debate an emergency supplemental bill. Aside from the above mentioned Rail Road to Nowhere, the supplemental contains over $82 million in “emergency” funds for disasters that happened prior to 2005 and going back all the way to 1999.

Nowhere in the text of the bill or in any committee reports are the projects that this money would fund listed. Instead, curious parties are referred to a table maintained by the Federal Highways Administration that lists the projects.

So now, not only are appropriators content to designate questionable projects as “emergency” funding, but they do so without even listing where the money will go in the text of the legislation.

So much for transparency.

Plus there’s this, from the Christian Science Monitor:

Remember Alaska’s “bridge to nowhere”? It’s about to be topped by what critics call Mississippi’s “railroad to nowhere,” which is quickly becoming the poster child for excessive spending by the Republican-controlled Congress.

The project, which was added to a $106.5 billion emergency defense spending bill in the Senate, would relocate a Gulf Coast rail line inland, to higher ground. Never mind that the hurricane-battered line was just repaired at a cost of at least $250 million. Or that at $700 million, the project championed by Mississippi’s two US senators is being called the largest “earmark” ever.

The controversy points to a deepening split in the GOP over whether to rein in spending in the face of wartime commitments and record deficits – and whether failing to do so threatens their majority in this fall’s midterm elections.

Yes they should — and yes, it does.

By the way, Trent Lott’s railroad to nowhere now has a dedicated website. I don’t think he’ll like that.

Much more at the Heritage Policy Weblog.