I’LL BE ON HUGH HEWITT’S SHOW in just a minute. You can listen online here. And check out what Mark Steyn had to say a bit earlier.

UPDATE: Transcript and audio here.

HEH. I’ll bet it’s better with bongoes, though.

MORE EVIDENCE of Saddam terror links.

THE AUDIO OF MY NPR DAY TO DAY INTERVIEW is now up — it’s here.

ANOTHER BLOW to the myth of impartiality.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Apparently, there’s some cost to this pork-barrel stuff:

JUNEAU — Alaska’s battered image means state lawmakers must loosen their purse strings if they want congressional aid to move the state’s big projects forward, U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens told the Alaska Legislature on Wednesday.

The Alaska Republican says the nation is facing an $8 trillion deficit and paying for troops in Iraq while Alaska is enjoying a $1.4 billion surplus and has $34 billion in the bank with the Alaska Permanent Fund.

That has prompted ill will in Washington that has led critics to question the need to send Alaska federal money when the state won’t spend its own cash.

That sentiment led to the stripping of earmarks from Alaska’s two so-called “bridges to nowhere” projects last year even though Congress still appropriated the money for the Ketchikan and Anchorage projects, he said.

Now the process of earmarking is under severe attack, Stevens said.

Let’s keep attacking.

FROM THE THIS-SUCKS-LIKE-A-BILGE-PUMP DEPARTMENT: FCC Chief Kevin Martin is apparently supporting a two-tiered Internet.

I think that Net neutrality has gotten us this far, and I don’t see any reason to get rid of it. What’s more, I suspect the motives, and motivations, of those who are buying into this.

UPDATE: Reader Ed Clarkson emails:

If you look at the original story at (Link), at the very least Gralla’s interpretation is debatable (a number of the comments there concur). Martin, in fact, said:

“Any provider who blocks access to the Internet is inviting customers to find another provider,” Whitacre said in his keynote speech. “It’s bad business.” He then emphatically stated that AT&T would not block
independent services, “nor will we degrade [Internet access]. Period,
end of story.”

The apparent confusion comes from the part of the article that says: “…Martin also added that he supports network operators’ desires to offer different levels of broadband service at different speeds, and at different pricing — a so-called “tiered” Internet service structure that opponents say could give a market advantage to deep-pocket companies who can afford to pay service providers for preferential treatment.”

Thus, from that summary it’s hard to tell whether Martin was referring to different total bandwith packages (e.g., $5/month for 4 GB; $10 for 10 GB; etc.), bandwith rate packages (e.g., $40/month for 6 Gb/s) or something else. In any case, I think it’s a bit premature to assign dire motives to Martin from the little hard information that’s available. If nothing else, I think it might be worth linking to the original story so people can decide for themselves.

Done. I certainly hope this is right.

FACULTY PLAGIARISM SCANDALS at Chinese universities.

WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE: Cory Booker, The Huffington Post, and The New York Times.

WILL VEHR NOTES an environmental hole in the blogosphere. Or is it a blogspheric hole in the envirosphere?

JAY COST is defending pork. Me, I’d rather be defunding it.

BILL FRIST IS unhappy with Harry Reid.

I’LL BE ON NPR’S DAY TO DAY today at about 12:40 Eastern most places; audio will be available online later, and I’ll post a link when it’s up.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, here’s another Army of Davids review, from Andy Kessler.

VIDEO PODCASTING: Dinner For 2 is a series of video podcasts featuring artists interviewed over dinner and drinks. I think the drinks part helps keep it loose. I liked the one with audio-engineering god Seva, one of the founders of Waves software. He did the mastering on the first album I ever produced, back before I learned to do that sort of thing myself, and did an excellent job as you’d expect.

MORE BAD PR FOR ISLAM: “Danish Imams Threaten to Blow Up Moderate Muslim Politician.”

This does more to make Islam look bad than any cartoon could.

JEFF JACOBY WEIGHS IN on Roe v. Wade for men.

THE BOOLA BOOLAH MULLAH: Really, Yale’s judgment in admitting this guy was pretty bad. (Pro-Yale speculation: Could the U.S. government have quietly arranged this as part of the negotiation that went along with the Taliban’s collapse? Problem with this speculation: No actual evidence to support it.)

John Fund also has another piece in the Wall Street Journal today, but it’s subscription-only. Here’s an excerpt:

Given his record as a Taliban apologist, Mr. Hashemi has told friends he is stunned Yale didn’t look more closely into his curriculum vitae. “I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay,” he told the New York Times. So how did he end up in the Ivy League? Questions start at the State Department’s door. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, chairman of the Judiciary Committee’s border security panel, has asked the State Department and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to explain exactly how Mr. Hashemi got an F-1 student visa. Yale’s decision tree is clearer. Richard Shaw, Yale’s dean of undergraduate admissions until he took the same post at Stanford last year, told the New York Times that Yale had another foreigner of Mr. Hashemi’s caliber apply but “we lost him to Harvard” and “I didn’t want that to happen again.” Mr. Shaw won’t return phone calls now, but emails he’s exchanged with others offer insights into his thinking. . . .

There is a line beyond which tolerance and political correctness become willful blindness. Eli Muller, a reporter for the Yale Daily News, was stunned back in 2000 when the lies of another Taliban spokesman who visited Yale “went nearly unchallenged.” He concluded that the “moral overconfidence of Yale students makes them subject to manipulation by people who are genuinely evil.” Today, you can say that about more than just some naïve students. You can add the administrators who abdicated their moral responsibility and admitted Mr. Hashemi.

I really don’t know what they were thinking, and it’s looking as if they weren’t thinking at all.

UPDATE: Fund’s story is now available subscription-free here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Yeah, I’ve wondered about this, too: “Ok, its bad enough and an amazing showing of a lack of critical thinking skills among academia that Yale took in ‘Mr. Taliban’ as a special student. But, the interesting question is who was the other ‘foreigner of Mr. Hashemi’s caliber’ that Yale lost to Harvard?”

Maybe we’ve been looking for Zarqawi in the wrong place. . . .

MICHAEL YON AND HUGH HEWITT talk about media coverage of Iraq on Anderson Cooper’s show — Ian Schwartz has the video. It’s worth noting these earlier comments by UPI’s Pam Hess, too. There’s some older history here.

INSTAPUNDIT: The Army of Davids review-aggregator blog! That’s what one reader suggested I call it. I plead guilty — what author wouldn’t link his reviews?

Anyway, today it’s a good review in The Wall Street Journal from Adrian Woolridge of The Economist. I’m very happy about that.

He’s right that the book is heavily influenced by Ronald Coase, though in writing it I didn’t think of Coase much — but if you go to Yale Law School, and especially if, as I did, you take a lot of courses by Guido Calabresi and Ralph Winter, that stuff becomes like water to a fish, I guess.

And here’s a blog-review of the book from John Walker, too. Yes, I’m aggregating!

A CHILDREN’S BOOK, by Danny Glover.

ANOTHER, RATHER DUBIOUS psychological study suggesting that conservatives are crazy. It’s worth noting that our last podcast was on the politicization of psychology over the past couple of decades, with Dr. Nicholas Cummings, a past President of the American Psychological Association.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has the full study.

HUGH HEWITT interviews Christopher Hitchens about media coverage and Iraq. And here’s Hewitt interviewing Michael Yon on the same topic.

DARFUR UPDATE:

While human rights activists and others applaud New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof for his coverage (by subscription) of Sudan, some are appalled at the paper’s business side for accepting an eight-page advertising insert singing the praises of the government of the African nation, which is widely considered responsible for genocide against its own citizens. The supplement lauds Sudan for facing a “peaceful, prosperous and democratic future,” and, according to felixsalmon.com criticizes the media for being “focused almost exclusively on the fighting between rebels and Arab militias.”

Human Rights Watch program director Iain Levine tells Daily News columnist Lloyd Grove that when he saw the ad “I practically fell off my seat on the subway …. I could not believe it.”

“Would the New York Times run an advertorial extolling the charitable works of Osama bin Laden?” asks felixsalmon. “Would it run advertisements from Nambla, or from the Ku Klux Klan?”

Apparently it would. Grove quotes a Time spokesperson as saying the paper took the ad because of “our strong belief that all pages of the paper — news, editorial and advertising — must remain open to the free flow of ideas.” But Mickey MacLean at World Views speculates that “it also didn’t hurt that an estimated $929,000 freely flowed into the newspaper’s coffers as a result of the section.”

Well, if you only take ads from organizations that share your opinions, then people will accuse you of being bought off. That’s a good argument for taking a wide range of ads, but there ought to be some limits. My blogads policy has been pretty much anything but Nazis. But Sudan looks pretty close to that line.

And, as Gateway Pundit notes, the New York Times took a different position when it came to publishing the Muhammad cartoons.

A LAW PROFESSOR IS UNDER FIRE for banning laptops in class. Some of my colleagues are unhappy with them, too — though mostly because they see students surfing and IM-ing in class — but I’m not so concerned. They’re grownups, and if they choose not to pay attention, they’ll face the consequences at exam time.