JOSH CHAFETZ has a column in the New York Times on what Congress needs to do on ethics reform.

Josh’s approach seems unlikely, but it’s better than the usual ethics-establishment approach, of which I’ve been critical in the past.

UPDATE: Link was bad before. Fixed now. Sorry!

ME, AUSTIN BAY, AND RICHARD FERNANDEZ: This week’s Blog Week in Review is up.

BYRON YORK: “it seems illustrative of the Obama phenomenon that so many Democrats have gotten so excited about him and don’t even know his name.”

With most candidates, the less you know about them, the more excited you are.

COOKWARE BLEG: Reader Mike Skelton emails: “I know you have posted on cookware in the past, have you any new information to pass on? We’re looking for a new set of non-stick pans.”

Got any advice for him? Other than this, I haven’t bought anything nonstick in a while.

DUKE RAPE UPDATE: KC Johnson reports that the Duke Board of Trustees just met and, well:

The Bob Steel-led Board of Trustees has just concluded its regularly scheduled meeting. The Board offered no comment on the serious conflict of interest allegations leveled against Steel by a left-to-right coalition of good-government groups in yesterday’s Washington Post. But the Board did make two moves—one by action, one by inaction—that made perfectly clear where the Board stands on Duke’s future.

Inaction

In its final meeting before the deadline to apply to Duke’s Class of 2011, the Board remained silent about Mike Nifong’s “separate-but-equal” system of justice for Duke students.

Parents considering spending the more than $40,000 annual tuition to send their son or daughter to Duke should, therefore, have no doubt that the institution will remain silent in face of a prosecutor who employs a different set of procedures for Duke students than those used for all other Durham residents. Prospective parents also now can be assured that the BOT has no complaints with the Durham PD’s official policy of meting out greater punishment to Duke students than to all other Durham residents for the same misdemeanor-level offenses.

Many might argue that with this silence, Duke’s trustees have failed in their fiduciary duty to the institution. But Steel, obviously, has a different vision of his proper role. . . . With its actions and non-actions today, the Board responded to those who have been urging Duke to take a clearer stand on the case. Not only is the Board unwilling to challenge Nifong’s “separate-but-equal” system for Duke students, but it went out of its way to reward the faculty who have acted as Nifong’s campus cheerleaders.

There’s much, much more.

AN ESTABLISHMENT CLAUSE QUESTION: “What if the Secretary of Homeland Security used general funds to build a mosque and pay an Imam?”

REYES IN, HARMAN AND HASTINGS OUT: The Wall Street Journal has a roundup. It’s a free link.

IN THE MAIL: Transgender Rights, from the University of Minnesota Press. It’s well-reviewed (“A must for transfolk and their allies!”) and raises interesting questions. Are the transgendered “disabled?” I’d say no, but I confess I haven’t given the subject a lot of thought.

UPDATE: Reader Diane Wilson emails:

As a “transgendered folk” (and a long-time reader of Instapundit) I have to speak up and say NO! I transitioned more than 11 years ago, without losing my job, my relationship, my church, or my friends. Over the next several years, I survived a dozen layoffs as my employer (Nortel Networks, a major telecom equipment and software company) imploded. I chaired a major, week-long professional conference (Usability Professionals’ Association, 2003 and 2004 conferences). I now work for a consulting firm, where I interact with our client’s business partners and customers every day. I’m active in my church (Unitarian) as a lay leader and facilitator of small group ministry.

In what way would I be considered disabled? I don’t get it.

Me neither.

WHEN CLUELESS PR PEOPLE target bloggers.

VAGINOFASCISM: Would that be fascism with a human, er, face?

VIDEO FLYCASTING LESSONS at The Itinerant Angler.

And check out the photoblog, too.

RICHARD MINITER HAS MORE on the flying imams: “Now new information is emerging that suggests it was all a stunt designed to weaken security.”

Read the whole thing.

MICHAEL LEDEEN is now blogging for Pajamas Media.

THANKS TO THE MIRACLE OF DIGITAL VIDEO RECORDING, I’ve been watching a lot more of Larry Kudlow’s show lately, and he’s definitely on a roll — unlike some righty television and radio shows that have seemed in a funk since the elections, he’s stayed sharp and on-point.

Tonight he had Steven Emerson on, talking about jihadists in the United States — the topic of Emerson’s new book, which he was of course promoting. I’m inclined to believe that there’s a lot of money and a lot of highly dubious influence flowing from Saudi Arabia and Iran (mostly the former) to the United States. But, still, not much in the way of action, five years since 9/11. Why? I’m not entirely sure.

EASTERN EUROPE IS UNHAPPY WITH THE UNITED STATES: “‘Our boys are good enough to die in Iraq, but not good enough to get a tourist visa in America,’ a senior Baltic politician complained to me recently.”

We should be making nice to them. Very nice. It doesn’t cost much, and they’ll notice. And it’s the right thing to do.

UPDATE: Reader Ben Poulos emails:

The people complaining definitely have cause. It is extremely hard for most people to get a visa, even student visas, and when someone in the US is willing to sponsor the applicants (like family visits or similar friendly visits)

One of the major problems is the cost; we charge $100 for each application, and then there is another charge for the visa, if approved.

For some context, $100 dollars in Ukraine is about 2 months pay for a basic job. Not even a bad job; just a normal job. It’s a huge barrier for people who want to come here for a visit. Pretty much the only people who can pay the cost are the really rich, and the mafia. The majority of the people in a country can’t afford the visit.

I realize that the money is intended to keep non serious applicants from gumming up the works. However, there are other ways we can provide disincentives to non-serious visa applications, and still make it possible for normal people to apply for a visa. We should at least have a program where the fee can be waved in certain situations. The fee is also meant to pay for our costs, but $100 dollars seems a bit much for a 15 minute visa interview.

Indeed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Jeffrey Rank emails:

Eastern Europeans are getting the short end of the stick, definitely. However, as EU accession occurs, things should become somewhat less stringent. That’s the hope among the people I know there.

Strange, immigration demands high ratings, officially, for Eastern Europeans because they could come here and stay illegally, perhaps being exploited, adding to the crime rate, and/or “doing jobs Americans won’t do.” The question then is, why just them?

Perhaps the Romanians and Bulgarians need to sue us for discrimination. Until they do that, I’m not sure a group of people who understand the horror of socialism and the expansionism of Islam would be the sort of chap this country needs.

Yes, we couldn’t have that. And another longtime reader/emailer writes:

Ben Poulos is correct. My wife is from Poland, she and her mother are now US Citizens living here. My wife’s sister is a surgical nurse living in Warsaw. She is married, they own a home and have 3 teenage children.

My wife’s sister has been trying to get a tourist visa for 4 years. She wants to visit her mother, who is 82, before she dies. She can’t get one because – she is told – she is too likely to overstay her visa and stay here illegally. She’s offered to put up the deed to her house as a bond, but she’s ignored.

(If you publish this, please don’t use my name)

Meanwhile illegal immigrants from Mexico face few barriers.

EUGENE VOLOKH POINTS OUT that the Washington Supreme Court just ruled that citizens have a right to keep and bear arms under both the Washington state and federal constitutions.

He also reports that the Kentucky Supreme Court recently found the same thing, with regard to the Kentucky and the federal constitutions.

SOME MUSIC REVIEWS from the Insta-Wife.

GATEWAY PUNDIT IS ALL OVER THE ICE STORM IN ST. LOUIS that has 500,000 people without power.

The folks without power probably can’t read it, but for the rest of you here’s a blackout survival guide from the folks at Popular Mechanics, and some guidelines on home generator safety. Generators can be useful, but they’re dangerous if not used carefully.

LITVINENKO UPDATE: “Scientists probing the death of Alexander Litvinenko said on Friday that two more people had been contaminated with the same radioactive poison that killed the former Russian spy.”

N.I.S.T.: Paperless electonic voting cannot be made secure.

I agree.

WALTER OLSON: “Tumbleweeds are not yet blowing through Manhattan’s vacant streets, but if New York is to hold onto its precarious pre-eminence in global finance, the US will need to get serious about reforming its costly and punitive legal environment for capital issuance. That was the message from yesterday’s much-awaited report by an expert panel on the competitiveness of the country’s financial markets convened by Henry Paulson, the Treasury Secretary.”

I think there’s an excessive degree of complacency on this topic.

DER SPIEGEL:

Authoritarian states like China, Iran and Egypt are having trouble dealing with the burgeoning number of critical online diaries. These blogs, which multiply by the second, expose news about incidents that many regimes would prefer to keep hushed up. In many countries, blogs are giving people their first real taste of democracy. . . .

It is this power of information that has made bloggers as feared as they are vulnerable in many countries.

Blogs are generally seen as a part of the “vague media.” Since their inception in the mid-1990s, they have multiplied exponentially. Nowadays a new Internet diary is launched every second, and the number of blogs doubles every five months. Forty-one percent are in Japanese, 28 percent in English and 14 percent in Chinese. The German contribution to a many-faceted “blogosphere” uninhibited by convention lies at a mere 1 percent, leading the German blogger community to ironically and self-desparagingly refer to itself as a kind of blogging backwater.

Der Spiegel, however, misses one German blog that is taking on the apologists for autocracy.

FINALLY, A WAR PLAN THAT MAKES SENSE:

Just days before the Iraq Study Group releases its top-secret report, President George Bush today ordered the Pentagon to preemptively redeploy U.S. troops from Iraq to “neutral neighboring countries including Iran and Syria.”

“I’ve said that I won’t order our troops to make a graceful exit from Iraq,” said Mr. Bush, “But I never ruled out making a graceful entrance into Iran and Syria where I expect our partners in peace to welcome us with open and raised arms.”

The order surprised many, coming as it does on the heels of news that the Pentagon has discovered “smoking gun” evidence that terrorists in Iraq use weapons shipped from Iranian factories to kill U.S. troops and others.

But Mr. Bush said the Iraq Study Group, Kofi Annan and other Democrats have convinced him that engagement with Iran and Syria is crucial to finding a “holistic solution” to the Iraq situation.

Heh. Indeed.

THE FLYING IMAMS: “What didn’t happen.”

AUSTIN BAY looks at why autocrats dislike Bush.