AN EXPLOSIVE TURN IN BOLIVIA: Publius has a report.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION is sometimes criticized for being too close to the Saudis. Here’s more such criticism.

ERIN CHAPIN videoblogs from Neyland Stadium.

NETANYAHU SPEAKS AT NYU: Video here.

MICHAEL SILENCE:

What a wacky world we live in.

Republicans have spent more than Democrats, and now Democrats favor censorship.

A third, non-idiot, party would be nice.

RUBY TUESDAY’S — the restaurant for fat people!

That slogan won’t sell, but I’m not the only one to complain about their new menu. Danny Glover writes:

I recently had a business lunch at Ruby Tuesday’s. I used to like going there because of the numerous healthy options on the menu, but they were gone on my last visit. I’m actually on a low-carb diet right now, so I was still able to order a steak and vegetables. Still, I was irritated that it was my only option.

Weirdly, my earlier post got me some abusive emails accusing me of betraying market principles and libertarianism by complaining about Ruby’s menu. But I wasn’t calling for the government to regulate them, just complaining about their new menu. A view of market capitalism in which customers aren’t allowed to express their dissatisfaction is . . . weird.

DAHLIA LITHWICK gives a rather positive review to Richard Posner’s new book on terrorism and the Constitution:

The real power of Posner’s effort is that he stands back and measures whether Guantanamo Bay and wiretapping are really worth it. It’s proof that the best cure for partisan shrieking is a good old-fashioned game of cost-benefit analysis.

Our podcast interview with Posner can be found here.

UPDATE: Here’s another positive review of Posner’s book, from Peter Berkowitz.

JOHN PODHORETZ doesn’t think much of the ABC 9/11 movie.

Unlike “Dave, from Minnesota,” he’s seen the film.

HOW WRONG CAN A FIVE-SENTENCE AP STORY ON GUNS BE? Eugene Volokh counts the ways.

FUTUREGIRL VIDEOBLOGS ON — what else? — houses of . . . the future!

MARTIN ALBRIGHT wonders if it’s time for station wagons to make a comeback:

If Mom and Dad had it, we don’t want it. The principle has been an article of faith since homo sapiens first stalked the savannah. Bouffant hairstyles? Brylcreem? Gedoutta here. Eighteen-hour girdles? Puh-lease. When it comes to vehicles, there’s nothing stodgier than Mom’s old station wagon. If thirty or forty-somethings think about the genre at all, it’s with mocking derision. From National Lampoon’s “Family Truckster” to That 70’s Show’s Vista Cruiser, the station wagon is the ultimate icon of suburban conformity and, well, blah. It really IS your father’s Oldsmobile. . . .

I’ve always believed wagons were God’s chosen vehicles. After all, what can a four-door sedan do that a station wagon can’t? Other than the sedan’s [highly subjective] advantage in the appearance department, nothing. Pistonheads will protest that station wagons don’t accelerate, corner or brake as well as their non-wagon counterparts. And no wonder; manufacturers usually delete the sedan’s high-performance parts from the station wagon’s OEM equipment list. When a station wagon gets the right greasy bits (think WRX, Magnum SRT-8) their performance is pretty damn close to the trunk-equipped version– and they retain the utility that makes a wagon, well, a wagon.

I agree. I drove a Passat wagon for years — had to have something that would hold the sound equipment — and it was a great car, roomy, comfortable, and fairly quick. I replaced it with the Highlander hybrid, and it’s an even better car, but it’s basically a station wagon with plausible deniability. Had I been able to get one, and had the InstaWife and InstaDaughter not threatened revolt over replacing the old car with something virtually identical, I would have probably gotten the Passat TDI wagon — not zoomy, with its diesel engine, but nearly as quick as the gas model and getting 38+ mpg.

DON’T MESS WITH NURSES: “A nurse returning from work discovered an intruder armed with a hammer in her home and strangled him with her bare hands, police said.”

I think this makes her a “murderer” in the opinion of some lobby groups. I disagree.

UPDATE: Don’t mess with wheelchair-bound grannies, either:

As muggings go, it began like many others. A 56-year-old woman was leaving her building in her wheelchair, her only company the small dog perched on her lap.

Her attacker came from behind, the police said, and there was no one else around. But this attempted robbery had an ending unlike many others. As it turns out, the would-be victim, Margaret Johnson, has a permit to carry a .357 handgun — and she carries it often.

The mugging ended seconds after it began, the police said, when Ms. Johnson pulled out her gun and shot her attacker in his arm. Last night, the man accused of the attempted mugging, Deron Johnson, 45, was in stable condition at Harlem Hospital Center with a gunshot wound to his elbow, the police said. He was under protective custody and is facing a robbery charge, the police said.

Even in New York, armed citizens can take a bite out of crime. Which is why they should have more of them. Nice to see the NYT reporting this kind of story. And note this bit: “The man accused of attacking her, Mr. Johnson (no relation), was described by the authorities as a ‘robbery recidivist,’ with nine previous arrests.” Not that surprising.

HERE’S MORE on the earmark transparency bill, from CNN:

Now that the blogosphere has revealed the “secret senator,” bloggers are claiming another victory after a bill authorizing a Google-like database of public spending passed the Senate.

Late Thursday, the senators passed the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act by unanimous consent after holds from “secret senator” Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, and Sen. Robert Byrd, D-West Virginia, were lifted. . . .

News of the bill’s passage was received triumphantly in the blogosphere, and one of the bill’s orginal co-sponsors, Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, credited “the army of bloggers and concerned citizens” for their victory.

Coburn and the bill’s other original co-sponsor, Sen. Barak Obama, D-Illinois, said they had reached agreement with sponsors of the House version, which was passed in June. The House could take up the new language as early as next week.

The Porkbusters podcast interview with House Majority Leader John Boehner can be found here.

MY FAVORITE THEORY SO FAR on the reason for Khatami’s visit: “Khatami and Cheney are negotiating or conferring on how to best get rid of Ahmadinejad, and that a few hours on the ground provide enough opportunity.”

Well, I’d certainly like it to be true.

FOILED CRUSHING OF DISSENT: Will Vehrs, suspended from his job for blogging, has won his grievance hearing. The complaint against him always seemed bogus to me, and has merely served to call attention to the poor economic prospects of Martinsville, Virginia — and the petty and otherwise deficient character of its town fathers.

A (MODEST) CIVL RIGHTS VICTORY at the University of Utah.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: The House and Senate have reached an agreement on the earmark reduction bill. House Majority Leader John Boehner reports:

House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (Mo.), U.S. Senators Tom Coburn (Okla.), Barack Obama (Ill.), and Tom Carper (Del.), and Government Reform Chairman Tom Davis (Va.) today announced that they have reached agreement on legislation to increase accountability and transparency by establishing a public database to track federal grants and contracts. House Majority Leader John Boehner (Ohio) announced he plans to schedule the agreed-upon language for House floor consideration next week.

“This process has focused on enhancing the accountability and transparency in the federal budget process,” Blunt, Boehner, and Davis said. “The federal government awards approximately $300 billion in grants to roughly 30,000 different organizations. Each year, roughly one million contracts exceed the $25,000 reporting threshold. We need to be sure that money is spent wisely. Our legislation creates a transparent system for reviewing these expenditures so that Congress, the press, and the American public have the information they need to conduct proper oversight of the use of our tax dollars. The package we’ve agreed to move requires the Administration to establish searchable databases for both grants and contracts.”

“I’m pleased that the House leadership agreed with us that all federal spending should be accessible through this website. It doesn’t matter if it’s a grant, an earmark, or a contract, this legislation will allow the public to know how their tax dollars are being spent,” said Sen. Obama.

It’s a small but important step. It’s worth noting, though, that as important as structural changes like this are, we also need to change the culture. That’s starting to happen, too, but we’ve got a long way to go. Transparency should help with that, though.

Here’s more from Americans for Prosperity. I certainly hope that this part is true: “With this online spending database now headed for reality, I have a feeling that those grassroots taxpayers and bloggers will soon show that they’ve just been getting warmed up.”

BLASTS IN INDIA: This time targeting Muslims. Amit Varma reports.

HERE’S MORE on McCain-Feingold.

A LOOK AT HOW ABC MAY REMEMBER the 50th Anniversary of 9/11.

“CREEPING DEMENTIA:” At Hot Air.

More on silly 9/11 conspiracy theories, here.

DRIVING A HYBRID, I only fill up every couple of weeks, and when I filled up last night I was pleasantly surprised to be paying $2.50/gallon, which was much less than I paid last time. I thought it was good news, but it turns out it’s all part of the insidious Big Oil conspiracy to lower prices.

UPDATE: Kathy Grim emails: “You may be really frustrated to know that you should have waited one more day to fill up. I filled up for $2.399 at Callahan and Central Ave Pike this morning.”

Those bastards! I blame Halliburton.

DANIEL DREZNER LOOKS AT THE LATEST SALVO in The New York Times’ jihad against Wal-Mart, and is deeply unimpressed: “This leads to a fundamental question — what on earth motivated the New York Times to put this article on the front page of its Business section? Properly headlined, an article that blares, ‘Little Money Flowing Between Wal-Mart and Washington Think Tanks’ wouldn’t even have run, much less on the front page.”

UPDATE: David Bernstein spots an amusing double standard in the story.

THE PAJAMAS MEDIA Blog Week in Review podcast is up, with Austin Bay, Roger Simon, Gerard van der Leun, and Tammy Bruce.

JOHN LEHMAN ON THE 9/11 FILM:

9/11 Commissioner John Lehman had some interesting takes on the controversy. “The larger truth,” he told us, “is that neither administration fully grasped what the threat was. Partially it was inadequate intelligence but you can’t blame it all on the inadequate intelligence — there was, I think, a very naïve view held by some in the Clinton administration, mainly Albright and Janet Reno that force was counterproductive.”

Lehman, a Republican, told us that the campaign against the film by the Clinton officials misses the point. “I think what they’re trying to do is to take the fact the specific scenes portrayed were fictional and to try to refute the underlying reality that the Clinton administration just didn’t get it. And by the way before 9-11 neither did the Bush administration.”

Yes, and that’s why I’ve never been too critical of the Clinton Administration, or the pre-9/11 Bush Administration. Hindsight is 20-20, but not many people took the threat of Islamist terror seriously enough before the World Trade Center attacks, and I certainly didn’t. As I noted a while back:

Before 9/11 — and what we learned afterward — I agreed with the basic strategy of trying to contain Islamist terror until it collapsed under the weight of its own stupidity. That was before I realized how widespread it was, and how thoroughly intertwined with hostile states it was. I don’t fault the Clinton people for not catching on before I did.

But I do fault the people who are peddling the absurd story that Clinton had this terror thing under control until Bush screwed it up. That’s partisan twaddle, and a real disservice in time of war.

By making a big noise over this film, the Clinton people are implicitly disavowing the “pass” they’ve enjoyed, and in the process inviting more, rather than less, scrutiny of that Administration’s antiterror record, which strikes me as very unwise, politically.

UPDATE: James Lileks has it right:

Just so you know: 9/11 reset the clock for me. All hands went to midnight. I’m interested in what people did after that date, and if the movie shows that before the attack one side lacked feck and the other was feck-deficient, I don’t worry about it. It’s like revisiting Congressional debates about Hawaiian harbor security in November 1941. Y’all get a pass. The Etch-A-Sketch’s turned over. Now: what have you said lately?

Yes.

Jay Reding has further thoughts.

MORE: ShrinkWrapped doesn’t like Democratic officeholders’ threats against ABC: “Not only is there is no awareness that the campaign they are running against the Disney Corporation is dangerous but they revel in their ability to use all the forces at their command to intimidate a media outlet. If Republicans did this, the howls of outrage would know no bounds, yet the Democrats, champions of civil liberties as they fancy themselves to be, propose censorship without a trace of irony.”

This is generating more blowback elsewhere: “This is exactly the sort of behavior that forces me to vote Republican even when I disagree with half their platform. Hopefully, the American people still believe the First Amendment should be upheld by both parties, and will act accordingly in November.”

STILL MORE: Reader Susan Voss notes that Peggy Noonan was ahead of the curve, writing in 1998:

Maybe, of course, I’m wrong. But I think of the friend who lives on Park Avenue who turned to me once and said, out of nowhere, “If ever something bad is going to happen to the city, I pray each day that God will give me a sign. That He will let me see a rat stand up on the sidewalk. So I’ll know to gather the kids and go.” I absorbed this and, two years later, just a month ago, poured out my fears to a former high official of the United States government. His face turned grim. I apologized for being morbid. He said no, he thinks the same thing. He thinks it will happen in the next year and a half. I was surprised, and more surprised when he said that an acquaintance, a former arms expert for another country, thinks it will happen in a matter of months.

So now I have frightened you. But we must not sit around and be depressed. “Don’t cry,” Jimmy Cagney once said. “There’s enough water in the goulash already.”

We must take the time to do some things. We must press government officials to face the big, terrible thing. They know it could happen tomorrow; they just haven’t focused on it because there’s no Armageddon constituency. We should press for more from our foreign intelligence and our defense systems, and press local, state, and federal leaders to become more serious about civil defense and emergency management.

Not enough people were thinking this way, obviously.