HITCHENS GIVES BILL MAHER’S AUDIENCE the finger. Should things go badly with the war, Maher’s audience — and, for that matter, Maher himself — will be cited by historians as evidence of the American opposition’s unseriousness.

UPDATE: Rand Simberg emails: “I suspect that historians will judge Democrats unserious regardless of the war’s outcome. In fact, if it goes badly enough, history of the era will be written in Arabic.” And even those historians won’t respect Maher and his audience, though they may be grateful for their petty Bush-hatred.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The entire Maher show is reviewed here.

MORE: Radley Balko says that Rand Simberg is objectively pro-terrorist. Next he’ll be questioning his patriotism!

MEETING THE BLOGGERS FACE TO FACE: “The successful bloggers I met certainly aren’t sad or joyless although some of them are perhaps a little bit on the obsessive side.”

He must mean Lileks. Certainly not moi.

THE ECONOMIST on who killed the newspaper. I’m guessing Adnan Hajj and a host of predecessors. . . .

(Via Jeff Jarvis).

JEFF TAYLOR: “Just who at The New York Times does Matt Nifong have naked pictures of? . . . Taking the lead investigator’s notes and using them as a narrative doesn’t really tell us anything we didn’t already know about the case while managing to gloss over the huge holes in Nifong’s case.”

Related comments from K.C. Johnson, Jeralyn Merritt, and Tom Maguire.

JAMES LILEKS: “Of course, one could make the case that the greatest threats to the freedoms of the West are posed by the head-choppers, plane-exploders, their many merry supporters, and the nuke-seeking state that supports them. . . . But don’t expect the artists to make the case. They saw what happened to that Theo Van Gogh fellow. They take the easy way out, these brave souls; they’ll perform ‘The Diary of Anne Frank,’ but only because now some people think it has a happy ending. They cradle their illusions like a big dead pig, singing them lullabies.”

AH, THE FAMOUS DAMNING BUT: I Hope And Pray We Don’t Get Hit Again-BUT…..

But it’ll be worth it if it gets rid of the damnable Bushitler regime. “If an attack occurred just before the elections, I have to think that at least a few of the voters who persist in this ‘Bush has kept us safe’ thinking would realize the fallacy they have been under.”

(Via Ace. He’s got a related post here.)

UPDATE: A more extensive Fisking from Caerdroia.

MIKE HUCKABEE: The Sam’s Club candidate?

MORE ON THE TRANSFORMATION OF Human Rights Watch.

UPDATE: Some further thoughts from Professor Kenneth Anderson.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Rand Simberg is even more critical.

TOM MAGUIRE HAS MORE ON STEM CELLS, here and here.

MORE PHOTO FORENSICS, this time involving a politician, not the media. Can I get a witness?

BOB OWENS may have discovered why the Editor of Editor & Publisher is so sympathetic to staged news.

Jeff Goldstein: “Fortunately for us, though, Google never forgets.”

UPDATE: Ouch: “I wasn’t a perfect reporter, but it’s pretty easy to avoid making stuff up out of whole cloth. My dad and I both know that. Mr. Mitchell does not. My dad and I are both conservative bloggers. Mr. Mitchell is editor of Editor and Publisher. Telling, isn’t it?”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Now Mitchell is charged with airbrushing the original story. After bloggers had quoted it. Can he be that stupid?

SADLY, NO: “I’m of the opinion that how to handle Wal-Mart is among the two or three most important issues facing the country.”

If only that were true! We’d have it made.

UPDATE: More on WalMart and its critics, here. I feel about WalMart like I do about Bush — it’s not that I’m crazy about them, it’s that their critics just seem crazy, period.

BLOG WEEK IN REVIEW IS UP, featuring Daniel Drezner, Austin Bay, and Gerard van der Leun.

I GUESS PORKBUSTERS IS MAKING PROGRESS: Just a few months ago, Dave Weigel was calling it “the ineffective bloggers’ group Porkbusters.”

Now he’s holding it up as a model of constructive political involvement:

Long-term, honest public pressure can force an administration to make changes or change course on a failed policy. It works on domestic issues: witness the Porkbusters campaign, which has rapped the president and Congress without apologies in an effort to shame them into cutting spending.

The advantage of PorkBusters is that it’s focused on one issue and been nonpartisan, criticizing porkers regardless of party. I don’t think the kind of criticism Weigel’s talking about can say the same, though I agree that it would have been more effective if it could. Anyway, it’s nice to see that PorkBusters’ progress is being noticed.

MAN ARRESTED FOR REBROADCASTING HEZBOLLAH TV:

A New York man was arrested yesterday on charges that he conspired to support a terrorist group by providing U.S. residents with access to Hezbollah’s satellite channel, al-Manar. . . .

The U.S. Treasury Department in March designated al-Manar a “global terrorist entity” and a media arm of the Hezbollah terrorist network. The designation froze al-Manar’s assets in the United States and prohibited any transactions between Americans and al-Manar.

Iqbal’s attorney, Mustapha Ndanusa, said yesterday that the accusations against his client are “completely ridiculous,” according to the Associated Press. Ndanusa added that he is not aware of another instance in which someone was accused of violating U.S. laws by enabling access to a news outlet.

This raises some interesting First Amendment issues, but don’t blame the Patriot Act or the Bush Administration here. The statute in question, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA, pronounced “Aiyeepa”) predates the Patriot Act by decades, and has just been upheld in another context by the Second Circuit. IEEPA is very far-reaching — in a case that I used to teach back when I taught International Business Transactions, United States v. Spawr Optical Research, 685 F.2d 1076 (9th Cir. 1982) (doesn’t seem to be online anywhere), the defendants had violated the Export Administration Act. They thought that they had a pretty good defense, in that the Export Administration Act had actually expired before their actions. The court held that the President had lawfully extended the expired statute’s provisions by regulation, under his general powers delegated by IEEPA.

I don’t like that case, but it’s one of several reasons why I find claims that the Bush Administration is exercising unprecedentedly broad powers unpersuasive.

Personally, I’d favor exempting retransmission of news material, etc., from the statute, and I think there’s a pretty good argument that this sort of prosecution violates the First Amendment. But it’s also true that sweeping powers of this sort are nothing new in the field of international trade.

THE MANOLO OBSERVES: “This intersection between the politics and the fashion it would appear to be at the corner of the Dull Street and the Boring Boulevard.”

JEFF GOLDSTEIN MAKES HIS VIDEO DEBUT, at Hot Air. Helen was surprised: “He’s really good-looking!”

UPDATE: Heh: “I’m officially starting a countdown to when Goldstein appears in drag on this show. And my money is on next Friday. Who’s in?”

OVER AT THE CORNER (scroll down) they’ve been discussing Serenity and Firefly for the past several days, and talking about Tim Minear’s politics. If you’re interested, we had a podcast interview with Tim Minear a while back.

IN THE MAIL: Benjamin Wittes’ new book, Confirmation Wars: Preserving Independent Courts in Angry Times. Seems pretty timely, and Amazon has provided a discussion forum.