KUWAITI WOMEN VOTE FOR THE FIRST TIME in parliamentary elections. Gateway Pundit has a roundup.

LEGENDARY SCIENCE FICTION PUBLISHER JIM BAEN has died. It’s a major loss. David Drake has posted an obituary.

WIRED EDITOR CHRIS ANDERSON has a piece on the power of “peer production” that seems right to me:

Now we have armies of amateurs, happy to work for free. Call it the Age of Peer Production. From Amazon.com to MySpace to craigslist, the most successful Web companies are building business models based on user-generated content. This is perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of the second-generation Web. The tools of production, from blogging to video-sharing, are fully democratized, and the engine for growth is the spare cycles, talent, and capacity of regular folks, who are, in aggregate, creating a distributed labor force of unprecedented scale. . . . But it’s a mistake to equate peer production with anticapitalism. This isn’t amateurs versus professionals; it’s each benefiting the other. Companies aren’t just exploiting free labor; they’re also creating the tools that give voice to millions. And that rowdy rabble isn’t replacing the firm; it’s providing the energy that drives a new sort of company, one that understands that talent exists outside Hollywood, that credentials matter less than passion, and that each of us has knowledge that’s valuable to someone, somewhere.

I haven’t read his new book, The Long Tail, yet, but I think I’m going to like it.

YESTERDAY AT THE CHURCH OF OPRAH: So if Oprah is a church, what is The View? Or do I even want to know?

HUGH HEWITT IS ON THE WARPATH about the New York Times’ publication of national security secrets.

And Robert Cox is, if anything, even angrier:

We will never know the full extent of the damage caused by The New York Times in disclosing the SWIFT monitoring program but have no doubt it was not a benign act. Whatever agony Keller may have gone through in deciding to publish the story will pale in comparison to the agony of the victims of the next terror attack, an attack that might have been prevented save for Keller’s choice.

Playwright David Mamet once wrote of elites “you’re all the same … It’s always ‘What I’m going to do for you.’ Then you screw up and then its ‘we did the best we could. I’m dreadfully sorry’ and people like us live with your mistakes the rest of our lives.”

We may be living with Keller’s mistake for a long time to come.

Ouch.

WHY AREN’T POWERLINES UNDERGROUND? I’ve wondered about that myself, and there’s a discussion at Slashdot.

TOM MAGUIRE: “I would be thilled to read a Times editorial explaining that, until they intervened, Bush was trampling European privacy laws merely to protect American lives. Until they write that, I still have the Comedy Channel.”

UPDATE: Lileks says that the Times has its limits:

If the Times learned that US troops were force-feeding Gitmo detainees with Coca-cola, they wouldn’t publish Coke’s secret formula. They might get sued. If there’s a CIA program that uses offensive cartoons of Mohammed to communicate with agents, they’ll keep mum, lest they have to publish the images. They might get stabbed. But secret law-enforcement-type programs as classified as the access code to the Times top-floor elevator? Fair game. You’ve the right to know.

He also offers an advance look at future scoops, which will really irritate them. Some secrets are sacred!

BARACK OBAMA thinks that Democrats should engage evangelicals. This gets him a Bronx cheer from Firedoglake: “[T]his bullshit from Barack Obama is Bill Clinton’s fault. The greatest victory of the radical right wing has been to train Democratic politicians to disrespect, mischaracterize and run against their base in the progressive movement. And that is Bill Clinton’s fault.”

Of course, as I’ve noted before, Hillary’s pretty religious herself.

ROGER SIMON WONDERS ABOUT getting Osama for the Glenn & Helen Show.

Apparently, he missed that episode. . . .

VIRGINIA POSTREL WRITES ON “The National Kidney Foundation’s bad math and guilty conscience.”

MORE ON KOS from Kaus.

Plus, “Job title: Blog Advisor!”

SAW MY BROTHER-IN-LAW THIS AFTERNOON: He started the chemo yesterday. He’s doing pretty well, considering: no big side effects, as feared, just major league boredom as he’s doing it in-patient for four days. He’ll have to repeat this several times, and the worst part is that it may help, or it may not. Just more reasons to pull for better medical technology. Bring it on.

GEEKS OF THE WORLD, BEWARE: Sarah Pullman warns of poor computer posture, and the havoc it can wreak on muscles and joints:

What probably scared me the most was the description of the earliest warning signs of repetitive stress problems – because almost everyone I know experiences them. These include tightness and soreness in the upper back and shoulders, and unfortuantely people tend to carry on as usual until they have symptoms down into their wrists and elbows.

Most geeks I know describe pain around their shoulder blades and upper back. Almost everyone has this pain right where your arm joins to your back, kind of around the back of your armpit on your mouse arm. (You know the one. And you know what it's from.)

So what are we doing to ourselves!? Are we all going to end up crippled down the road?

She recommends yoga, which isn’t a bad solution. Take it from me — I’ve been fending off RSI since Reagan’s first term — it’s worth paying attention to this stuff.

HUGH HEWITT: “How can the Congressional majority be this lame?”

THE CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES is up!

ANDREW SULLIVAN is calling me passive aggressive for linking this post by Jeff Goldstein. I didn’t really think it was about Andrew, but it seems that these days, everything is about Andrew. Except Andrew’s blog, which seems to devote a disproportionate amount of attention to me.

It’s funny, though, that Kos called me “passive aggressive” in an email to the Townhouse email list and now Sullivan’s repeating the phrase. (Of course, compared to Kos, everyone’s passive-aggressive). But then, Jeff Goldstein was announcing Sullivan’s transformation into a Kos diarist ages ago. I guess he was just ahead of the curve. . . .

That’s okay, I’m used to abuse.

UPDATE: Jeff Goldstein responds to Sullivan.

WHITE MEN can’t clap.

NORM GERAS looks at wanton murder and press hypocrisy.

EUGENE VOLOKH: “Would the Supreme Court uphold a ‘spending limit’ for abortion?”

Of course not. That’s an important right, not something trivial like political speech.

UNSCAM UPDATE: Oil-for-food hits a New York courtroom, and Claudia Rosett has the story.

THE NATIONAL JOURNAL’S DANNY GLOVER comments on John McCain’s Porkbusters post.

A LOOK AT THE Herpes theory of the Commerce Clause.

LOSING LARRY SUMMERS GETS EXPENSIVE:

It’s official: Larry Ellison is walking away from a promise to donate $115 million to Harvard University.

The Oracle Corp. founder and chief executive, the world’s 15th-richest person, made headlines in 2005 when, in an interview with The Chronicle, he pledged to make a major donation to Harvard to study world health. But Ellison decided against the donation after Harvard President Lawrence Summers announced his resignation earlier this year. Summers will leave the university on Friday.

And yet, I think the biggest damage to Harvard wasn’t economic.

FOR MY NEXT TRICK, I’LL DO IT WHILE DRINKING WATER: Kos, Lamont, and political ventriloquism, at Hot Air.

TERRORISTS ENCOUNTER BLOWBACK: “President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday ordered Russia’s special services to hunt down and ‘destroy’ the killers of four Russian diplomats in Iraq, the Kremlin said.”

Just as long as he doesn’t send them to Guantanamo or anything.

UPDATE: Bill Quick: Is “hunt down and destroy” in the Geneva Convention?