ABRAMOFF UPDATE: Remembering Roger Tamraz. Everything old is new again. Or maybe the other way around. . . .

THIS SEEMS LIKE GOOD NEWS: “The number of newly laid-off workers filing claims for unemployment benefits fell to the lowest level in more than five years last week, providing strong evidence that the labor market is shaking off the effects of a string of devastating hurricanes.”

PAT ROBERTSON OFFERS US ANOTHER REMINDER of why he was one of the original models for the term “idiotarian:”

Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson suggested Thursday that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s stroke was divine punishment for “dividing God’s land.”

David Corn isn’t sure what to make of this: “So God visited a stroke upon Sharon because God is opposed to the Middle East peace process? That’s what Robertson is saying. (But if God didn’t want progress in the Middle East, why did God let Arafat die? I’m confused.)”

UPDATE: Joe Gandelman notes a Robertson soul brother.

MARK STEYN ON DEMOGRAPHY ON HUGH HEWITT: The transcript is here.

BRING IT ON:

AN EXTRAORDINARY “hyperspace” engine that could make interstellar space travel a reality by flying into other dimensions is being investigated by the United States government.

The hypothetical device, which has been outlined in principle but is based on a controversial theory about the fabric of the universe, could potentially allow a spacecraft to travel to Mars in three hours and journey to a star 11 light years away in just 80 days, according to a report in today’s New Scientist magazine.

The theoretical engine works by creating an intense magnetic field that, according to ideas first developed by the late scientist Burkhard Heim in the 1950s, would produce a gravitational field and result in thrust for a spacecraft.

Also, if a large enough magnetic field was created, the craft would slip into a different dimension, where the speed of light is faster, allowing incredible speeds to be reached. Switching off the magnetic field would result in the engine reappearing in our current dimension.

Color me skeptical, but in a wanting-it-to-be-true kind of way. (Via Bainbridge).

IT’S BAA-AAA-AACK: “Zeta again strengthened into a tropical storm Thursday and could break the record for the storm lasting the longest into January since record keeping began in 1851.”

THOUGHTS ON THE SINGULARITY, from Dean Esmay.

WARD CHURCHILL UPDATE: A reader emailed to ask what was going on, and I referred him to PirateBallerina.com, which has been on top of this story from the beginning. Check it out for all your Ward Churchill needs.

LAST NIGHT, HUGH HEWITT discussed George Bush’s crimes with Professor Rosa Brooks of the University of Virginia law school. There’s a transcript online here.

REDSTATE LAUNCHES SWANNBLOG: Mike Krempasky emails “Why? Because it’s Lynn-Frickin’-Swann, that’s why!”

IN THE MAIL: Dorian Greyhound : A Novel, by Sheryl Longin — who happens to be married to Roger Simon. According to the Amazon page, revenues are going to greyhound rescue.

MICHAEL TOTTEN LOOKS AT the slow rot of Hosni Mubarak. I’m not sure it was all that slow, actually.

REBECCA MACKINNON: “Why Microsoft’s China censorship matters to everybody.”

HERE’S A LOOK at coming attractions in space law.

THE POPULAR MECHANICS PEOPLE were nice enough to invite me to go along to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, but I wasn’t able to make it, alas. They’re blogging what they’ve found, though, and it looks like an interesting new wave of gadgets. Editor Jim Meigs emails: “My takeaway after a few hours is that while last year they showed a lot of high def stuff that didn’t materialize (like DVRs) this year it looks like it will really arrive.”

SHE’S EVERYWHERE: Ana Marie Cox on the Abramoff scandal, in the NYT: “Sad to admit it, but most of what Jack Abramoff did with politicians (as opposed to his outright fraud with Indian tribes) wasn’t criminal so much as extreme. The Hollywood arc would have a chain-gang of Congressmen breaking rocks by the final reel, but we are unlikely to get such satisfaction outside of celluloid.”

TOM MAGUIRE: “I don’t want the Times deciding, in wartime, just what information I “deserve to have”, thank you very much – they are not elected,they are not accountable, and frankly, I do not trust their politics. But rather than abandon my fellow citizens to the mercies or depredations of the Bush Administration, let me offer a constructive suggestion – since we have a representative democracy, complete with institutional checks and balances and two parties, how about if the purveyors of classifed info, when troubled by their consciences, take their troubles to a Congressional oversight committee rather than the NY Times?”

DANIEL GLOVER has been looking at 2006 candidate blogs. So far he’s covered Texas and Illinois. Only 48 more states to go!

MORE ON ABRAMOFF: “One of the crimes was bribing “Staffer A” to oppose a postal rate increase. What? That’s a crime? I think it is a public service we should all be thankful for.” Heh. There’s a suggestion for PorkBusters, too.

MEGAN MCARDLE has more on the FDA and Cyalert matter mentioned by Teresa Nielsen Hayden below.

JEFF JARVIS: “One terrible lesson of the West Virginia mine tragedy is that you can’t trust the news. You never could; it has always taken time to see whether stories pan out, to get all the facts, to find out the truth. But now, in our age of instant news and ubiquitous communication, the public sees this process as it occurs. It’s not the news that’s live; it’s the process of figuring out what to believe that’s live.”

Yes. As I noted in my earlier post, it’s not so much that I blame them for getting the story wrong — everybody makes mistakes — it’s that I know that if a blogger made a similar error, with similar consequences, Anderson Cooper would be among those blaming the “undisciplined, editor-free” blogosphere. In fact, we saw a bit of that last year when bloggers were blamed for talking about news organizations’ own — wrong — leaked exit polls.

Meanwhile, here’s a blogger’s firsthand report. “Be careful, though, trying to pin the blame for this fiasco on the media. There is a difference between spreading a rumor and reporting that a rumor is spreading. Don’t think so? Try to imagine a scenario where live cameras pointing at the church could have avoided showing the jubilation that erupted there when the despicable rumor began that the twelve were alive.” Well, yes. But again, I don’t think they’d cut non-traditional media the same slack. They certainly haven’t done so in the past.

JOHN TAMMES: “Edward Gibbon, or Douglas MacArthur?”

AVIAN FLU UPDATE: “Turkey said on Wednesday two people had been diagnosed with bird flu — the first human cases outside Southeast Asia and China — and a doctor said one of them, a 14-year-old boy, had died from the killer H5N1 strain.” Meanwhile, Roche is sending more Tamiflu to the United States, though that’s in response to an outbreak of ordinary, non-avian flu.

UPDATE: More bad news: “Bird flu killed a second teenager in eastern Turkey early Thursday, one day after health officials confirmed her brother as the first fatality by the virus outside of East Asia.” Exposure to poultry seems to have been involved, though.

JIM PINKERTON writes on technological threats and the need for space colonization.

That theme gets a chapter in An Army of Davids, along with a discussion of how small-scale private efforts might make it happen.

Kaus is skeptical, although Greg Egan wrote a fine novel based on staying ahead of the posse.

UPDATE: Reader David McCune emails:

One thing that Pinkerton didn’t mention about Heinlein’s alternate future was that mankind had reached and colonized the stars much earlier precisely because space flight had been a private, for-profit venture form the beginning. Between gray goo catastrophes, terrorists of all stripes, and an ever-growing government, it’s hard to be long-term optimistic without invoking space colonization.

Indeed. Something else that Heinlein said was that the Earth is too fragile a basket to hold all of our eggs.

ORIN KERR has more thoughts on the NSA interception program: “Based on what I have read from Risen’s book, it seems less likely to me than it did before that this is a TIA-like data-mining program. . . . For those with criminal law experience, this was basically a large-scale pen regsister/trap-and-trace or wiretap, depending on how the filters are configured. (I’m not sure how different telephone traffic is these days, at least inside the provider switches.) This is different from a data-mining program.”

If it’s a pen-register type program, of course, no warrant is required, as it’s pretty well established that there’s no expectation of privacy in “envelope” type information, even if it’s normally read only by machines, not human beings. Orin also has some thoughts on why the disclosure of this information might be damaging to national security.