OOPS! OR NOT? Hezbollah hit Jenin. In the West Bank. Palestinians cheered: “Even if it fall on our heads it wouldn’t have spoiled the party.”

HEZBOLLAH THREATENS JOURNALISTS: Christopher Allbritton, reporting from Lebanon, says “To the south, along the curve of the coast, Hizbullah is launching Katyushas, but I’m loathe to say too much about them. The Party of God has a copy of every journalist’s passport, and they’ve already hassled a number of us and threatened one.”

They threatened me too, and that was during peace time.

NOT ANTI-WAR BUT ON THE OTHER SIDE: A group that calls itself the Armed Revolutionary Fascists vandalized Jewish stores in Rome and defaced them with swastikas and pro-Hezbollah propaganda.

REMEMBERING STEVEN VINCENT: Judith Weiss hosts a blogburst commemoration to the murdered journalist over at Kesher Talk.

HEZBOLLAH WOKE UP: Allison Kaplan Sommer interviews Erika Galili live from an Israeli bomb shelter in a podcast for Pajamas Media.

“LEBANON IS A FINAL COUNTRY FOR ALL ITS CHILDREN”: Robert Rabil says a fresh debate has broken out in Lebanon’s Shia community about Hezbollah’s allegiance to Iran.

WHY LEBANESE BLAME SYRIA: A timeline of events, beginning in 1976, that led up to the current crisis.

WALID JUMBLATT, Syria’s fiercest enemy in Lebanon, says Lebanon is being pushed solidly into the Syrian-Iranian axis. “Our government will be like the government of Abu Mazen (Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas) next to Hamas or maybe worse like the government of [Nouri al] Maliki in Iraq.”

ID KOd in KS: It looks like another defeat for intelligent design advocates. Yesterday’s election for the state school board returned “moderate” candidates, who might now have an edge over conservative board members who had sought to change the science curriculum in the state to include discussion of intelligent design. [If they are going to have a slight edge, are you sure that the election represents a KO? — Ed.] You again? Okay, fine, next time, I’ll let you title the post.

MATTHEW YGLESIAS sums up the frustration of many economists who want efficient gas/carbon taxes, rather than next-to-useless alternative fuel subsidies and surprisingly ineffective increases in CAFE standards:

Tragically, if you tell people you’re going to tax their ft ossile fuels, they freak out and your political career dies a swift and merciless death. But if you tell people you’re going to subsidize alternative energy sources the people will like that. Functionally, however, these are basically the same thing, except for the fact that the tax method works much, much better.

THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES Chris Anderson, the brilliant editor of Wired, says that digital photography isn’t just making film cheaper, or special effects more spectacular; it’s changing the way actors make movies.

THE NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE on men not at work has gotten a lot of coverage here and elsewhere. It has inspired a provocative post on gender roles over at Family Scholars:

The great gender challenge of our day has been defined by our elites as the fact that men still do not contribute as much as women do to the domestic sphere. . . .

But I wonder if the great gender challenge of the rest of this century will be the abolition of the norms and practices that have supported the male breadwinning role–the idea that men should, indeed, must work, often in jobs not to their taste, throughout their adult lives on behalf of a wife and children. According to the distinguished anthropologist David Gilmore, the danger with men is that they often drift towards entropy unless they are given a unique and highly valued role to play on behalf of their society. This entropy certainly seems to be on full display in this sobering NYTimes story on grown, able-bodied men in the U.S. who refuse to or are unable to work.

THE MAGNIFICENT BISON.

How did Althouse get that shot? Like many a candyass Yellowstone tourist, this way:

I put some thought into whether it’s okay to write “candyass” on Instapundit, but I was stumped for synonym. I don’t like “lame” in this context, because it makes me think of the disabled persons who might need to tour by car. So I tried a Bartleby search for “candyass” and got exactly one hit, and it’s not from the thesaurus. It’s a quote… from Nixon — “What does that candyass think I sent him over there for?” — miffed that the Secretary of the Treasury George P. Schultz wouldn’t authorize tax audits for his critics. Wow. That amuses/disturbs me so much I’m going to read it as authorization to write “candyass” on Instapundit. You know, that bison reminds me of Abraham Lincoln. Look at the profile. And doesn’t he seem rather depressed? He was trudging along the side of the road, as if he’d been given the job of making it really easy for the tourists to get a good look at a big animal and he’d been doing it for years and years.

FREE SPEECH AND THE U.S. LIBERTARIAN TRADITION: Another book I’m reading this summer, which I highly recommend, is Ronald Krotoszynski’s The First Amendment in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Professor Krotoszynski, who teaches law at Washington and Lee, examines freedom of speech in four other liberal democracy, Canada, Germany, Japan, and the U.K., and compares our free speech regime with that of those countries. Some may be surprised at how freedom of expression is often (from the U.S. point of view) subordinated to other values, like multiculturalism, personal dignity, and the like in those countries. In fact, when it comes to protecting free speech, the priority it is given by our courts, especially the U.S. Supreme Court, makes the U.S. something of an outlier in the world. While I think that our courts get it right, Professor Krotoszynski’s book (and comparative studies generally) is a reminder that our libertarian tradition was not inevitable, nor is it the only possiblity for liberal democracies.

“I’M A FIEND FOR MOJITOS”: Other than that cheesy line, uttered by Colin Farrell, Miami Vice was a good movie. It was edgy and dark, Farrell and Jamie Foxx brooded convincingly. Michael Mann even found a good replacement for Lt. Castillo, played in the TV series by Edward James Olmos. Remember when it turned out that Castillo was some kind of ninja or something? What was that all about?

WONDERING ABOUT the Floyd Landis doping test? Chemist and blogger extraordinaire Derek Lowe has the scoop.

DEMOCRACIES AND WAR: I forgot something when I made my list of small encouraging signs. Perhaps I left out one that isn’t so small.

This war in the Middle East nearly demolishes the theory that democracies don’t go to war with each other. Lebanon, aside from Hezbollah’s state-within-a-state, is a democracy. At least it’s an almost-democracy. Aside from my personal affection for Lebanon, the country where I recently lived, the only country other than the US where I’ve ever lived, this is what anguishes me the most: The Arab world’s only democracy is being torn to pieces by another democracy.

But it’s telling, I think, that the Lebanese army, the fighting institution that represents democratic Lebanon and not just one totalitarian-sponsored political party, has chosen to sit this one out.

BAGHDAD BOB IS BACK: Haaretz reports that much of Hezbollah’s bragging is bogus.

THREATSWATCH says Hezbollah is doomed.

LEBANON.PROFILE is extremely upset that Israel did not attempt to ally itself with Lebanon. (He could be, and most likely is, just as frustrated that Lebanon did not attempt to ally itself with Israel.) He quite correctly points out that Israel and Lebanon are similar countries with similar regional problems and the same list of enemies. I’ve been saying for some time now that the two would be natural allies in a more intelligent world. Maybe someday, years from now, after all this is over, and – Inshallah – Hezbollah is out of the picture.

HOW GOES THE WAR? Dean’s World features two back-to-back essays on the same question. Aziz Poonawalla says Hezbollah is winning. Ron Coleman says Israel is winning. Who’s right? Who knows? I link, history decides.

HUGO CHAVEZ HAS MADE enormous changes at PDVSA (pronounced Peh-deh-VEH-sa by those in the know), the Venezuelan state-run oil company, since he came into power. This Page One article in the Wall Street Journal details many of them.

In some cases, Mr. Chávez has literally taken PDVSA assets and handed them to the poor. The elegant five-story headquarters for PDVSA Servicios, a subsidiary that oversaw communications and technology services for the oil giant, has been turned into the Bolivarian University of Venezuela. The university’s 5,000 students get a free ride: tuition, materials, health care and food are paid for by the oil company.

Students and teachers view the campus’s marble-lined elevators, expensive artwork and baseball field as evidence that PDVSA’s executives lived too cushy a life for a poor nation before Mr. Chávez came to power. As a group of students and teachers play baseball, 36-year-old English teacher Claire Bendahan looks on in approval. “This is socialism in action,” she says. “Now our country’s oil money is being used for the poor.”

Unfortunately, as the WSJ piece documents, that oil revenue is eroding–by my understanding, because Chavez sacked all the managers who knew anything, and replaced them with reliable political supporters who spend money on social programmes instead of oil exploration. The only thing saving Chavez from himself is steadily rising oil prices; if they reverse, it’s a good bet that the Venezuelan government will fall, doing serious damage to the resurgant left-wing populist strain of Latin American politics. I’m told that PDVSA used to be known as the only state-run oil company that was competitive with the majors in terms of expertise and efficiency; now it is rapidly descending past other state-run firms in terms of competence. Since Venezuela’s oil is unusually heavy, sulphurous, and difficult to extract, that decline will be a disaster for Venezuela’s poor, who may be enjoying those marble elevators without electricity to run them if oil falls back towards $25 a barrel. This is not some grim gloating of a classically liberal economics writer at having been proven right. If PDVSA screws up the Venezuelan oil supply, consumers around the world will suffer, the poorest worst–and the poorest Venezuelans worst of all.

THE FOG OF WAR makes it nearly impossible to say who is actually winning or losing militarily in Lebanon. The politics are much easier to read. Right now it looks good for Hezbollah, bad for (the rest of) Lebanon, bad for Israel, and bad for the United States. But the politics are in constant flux and probably won’t stabilize even after the fighting is over. Here are four small encouraging signs posted over at my own blog.

AL ARABIYA reports that Sunni extremists in the Muslim Brotherhood may have joined with Hezbollah in Lebanon to fight the Israelis. (Arabic here, English reference here.) I don’t know if it’s true. And if it is true the MB guys are almost certainly going to die. But it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it’s true. Israelis all but guaranteed severe political consequences as soon as they bombed Beirut. Lebanon’s sects are temporarily united in common defiance. It won’t last very long. But it will last until after a ceasefire, making a ceasefire on Israel’s terms instead of Hezbollah’s that much more difficult if the military campaign continues to look anything like a draw.

IS MEL GIBSON MANIC DEPRESSIVE? That’s about the only conceivably exculpatory thing I’ve heard, since some manic-depressives do suffer from paranoia and hallucinations. But even if it were true–and whether or not it is, I bet we hear about it on a very special Barbara Walters–I doubt it will save his career.