JAMES TARANTO on the new Republican leadership: “But hey, who better to lead the GOP minority than the men who helped create it?”

MORE good news about resveratrol.

MORE ON MILTON FRIEDMAN: Popular Mechanics Editor Jim Meigs emails:

I loved the Tennis with Milton piece. Did you also know that Friedman was a sci-fi fan?

My father, A. James Meigs, studied under Friedman at the University of Chicago and remained a lifelong friend. We visited Milton and his wife, Rose, at their summer house in New England when I was 15 years old. I remember vividly how Milton quizzed me on what books I was reading. When I mentioned Robert Heinlein he was delighted. We had a detailed conversation about “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress,” Heinlein’s great thought experiment in radical libertarianism.

I came away struck with his genuine interest in the thoughts of a semi-articulate teenager. My father says this was one of Friedman’s most striking traits as a teacher. “I never met a more gracious professor,” he says.

At a time when every political debate seems to devolve instantly into name calling, it is nice to remember Friedman’s wonderful example of gracious, gentlemanly debate. We could use more of that today.

Indeed we could. And Tim Minear — of Firefly and Serenity fame — is working on a filmed version of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Efforts to translate Heinlein to film haven’t generally been very successful, but if anyone can do it, it’ll be him. We talked with Minear about that project in this podcast interview a while back.

Lots more on Friedman here.

TEXT AND VIDEO OF MCCAIN’S GOPAC SPEECH are available online here. “We increased the size of government in the false hope that we could bribe the public into keeping us in office. And the people punished us. We lost our principles and our majority. And there is no way to recover our majority without recovering our principles first.”

COFFEE GRINDING: Reader Thom Hill writes: “Did you buy the KitchenAid burr grinder?”

Nope, it was too pricey. I wound up going with this one instead. Seems to work very well, and it’s much quieter — more of a low rumble as opposed to the circular-saw whine of my old blade-type grinder.

UPDATE: Catching up to InstaPundit, the Wall Street Journal has an article — subscription only — on coffee grinders today. It says the KitchenAid is best overall, but they liked the Capresso for the money. That’s pretty much the InstaPundit reader consensus, too. They also liked the Solis Maestro, which occupies an intermediate position.

IN RESPONSE TO YESTERDAY’S BLOOD DONATION POST, Clayton Cramer notes my comment that I don’t know many people who are eligible to donate blood and asks: “What kind of people does InstaPundit hang with?”

Well, people who’ve been in Africa, or Europe; people who’ve been in the military; people with various medical problems, etc. They even ask about acupuncture now.

OUTSOURCING cargo transport to the space station.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY:

A nation that’s defended Europe from aggression in the 60 years since World War II is asking why Iraq can’t defend itself. The fact is, Iraqis risk their lives for their country every day.

Clearly the days when Democrats warned of a long twilight struggle and pledged to pay any price and bear any burden to ensure the success and survival of liberty are over, judging from remarks by Carl Levin, incoming chairman of the Senate Armed Service Committee.

“We cannot save the Iraqis from themselves,” Levin opined Wednesday at a Capitol Hill press conference. “The only way for Iraqi leaders to squarely face that reality is for President Bush to tell them that the United States will begin a phased redeployment of our forces within four to six months.”

“We cannot be their security blanket,” he added. But why not, if it’s in our best long-term security interest?

Yes, we should demand more of the Iraqis. But those who ask whether we can or should stop Iraqis from killing themselves forget that we’re in this to stop others from killing us and using Iraq as a base camp from which to do it.

We’ve been Europe’s security blanket for six decades. We are Japan’s security blanket. We are South Korea’s. It’s been said that were it not for us, the French would be speaking German and the Germans would be speaking Russian. In 1938, the West decided it couldn’t be Czechoslovakia’s security blanket and sold out that country in Munich, Germany. The rest, as they say, is history.

Yes, I’d like to see a timetable for getting troops out of Europe. It’s time they took responsibility for their own security and stopped their childlike dependence upon / resentment of America. They need to work on more responsible democratic institutions, too. The Iraqis I’ll give a bit longer.

JOHN TAMMES POSTS ANOTHER ROUNDUP of news from Afghanistan.

TENNIS WITH MILTON FRIEDMAN: “I sized up his spindly legs, his glasses. Even in tennis whites he really looked the whole egghead thing. But I noticed that his racket looked ominously well used.”

OF CAREERS AND READERS at The Los Angeles Times:

This, in a nutshell, is the essential problem with the L.A. Times: Those who work there care a great deal about their careers and very little about their readers. I’m not one of those who think the paper should dismantle its foreign and national bureaus – of course a big-circulation paper in a major city like L.A. should have at least some of its own reporters around the world – but it’s possible to maintain all that while also realizing that readers can now just as easily subscribe to the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal for home delivery as the L.A. Times.

So you’ve got to give locals a reason to get their local paper instead, and probably that means a renewed emphasis on local news, even though, yes, being a foreign correspondent is much more glamorous.

A good example of how the L.A. Times constantly fails at all this comes courtesy of Sharon Waxman’s smart, engaging little piece last week in the New York Times, about Carrie Fisher, a Los Angeles personality who’s about to appear in a one-woman show at a Los Angeles theater. So naturally, the New York Times did the story first.

Kaus has been complaining about the LAT’s lack of local coverage for years.

LORIE BYRD LOOKS at the difference a week can make.

Meanwhile, The Mudville Gazette sings The Ballad of John and Nancy.

UPDATE: Uh oh: “Bob Wright’s post-election euphoria is giving way to nagging doubts about the Democrats’ strategic prowess!”

LORIE BYRD LOOKS at the difference a week can make.

JOHN EDWARDS’ staffer turns to Wal-Mart for help getting a PlayStation 3 for Edwards’ kids. Wal-Mart says to get in line like everybody else. Edwards says he knew nothing about it.

UPDATE: “It’s hard out here for a nerd.”

BAD BEHAVIOR BY THE FBI: “Two Boston men who spent 30 years in prison for an underworld slaying they did not commit are suing the federal government after the FBI withheld evidence that would have cleared them to protect an informant.”

This stuff goes back to the very earliest days of InstaPundit. Alas, I’m not convinced the problem has been fixed.

I WONDER WHAT HIS D.U. HANDLE IS?

A renowned black magic practitioner performed a voodoo ritual Thursday to jinx President George W. Bush and his entourage while he was on a brief visit to Indonesia.

Ki Gendeng Pamungkas slit the throat of a goat, a small snake and stabbed a black crow in the chest, stirred their blood with spice and broccoli before drank the “potion” and smeared some on his face.

“I don’t hate Americans, but I don’t like Bush,” said Pamungkas, who believed the ritual would succeed as, “the devil is with me today.”

Indeed.

BANKING ON Indian umbilical cords.

HD-DVD & BLU-RAY: DOA? “Both formats will fail, not because consumers are wary of a format war in which they could back the losing team, a la Betamax. Universal players that support both flavors of HD should appear early next year. No, the new formats are doomed because shiny little discs will soon be history.”

I’m not so sure. There’s some evidence that people like buying shiny discs.

A LOOK AT STUDENT FREEDOM AND ACADEMIC DISHONESTY, from Eugene Volokh.

ADVICE TO THE HILLARY CAMPAIGN: Hire a voice coach, stat!

GOOD NEWS ON OIL SHALE:

The Bureau of Land Management cleared the way for three oil companies to lease public land for experimental oil shale projects in western Colorado.

The federal agency said Monday the research and development projects would have minimal impact on the environment, a claim disputed by environmentalists.

BLM spokesman Vaughn Whatley said the test operations “could begin as early as next summer.”

Shell, Chevron USA and EGL Resources want to test technology for extracting oil from shale on five 160-acre parcels of land in Rio Blanco County, in Colorado’s Piceance Basin. . . .

The Green River shale deposits in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming are estimated to contain 1.5 trillion to 1.8 trillion barrels of oil. And while not all of it can be recovered, half that amount is nearly triple the proven oil reserves of Saudi Arabia.

Last month, a Shell executive said he was optimistic about the company’s research on oil shale extraction, adding that Shell’s project in western Colorado could become reality by the middle of the next decade.

Much more here. Plus, some environmentalists are complaining. Hey, we can always build some nice clean nuclear plants, instead. . . .

Thanks to reader Linda Seebach for the links.

MILTON FRIEDMAN HAS DIED. It’s hard to say that someone has been plucked untimely at the age of 94, but it feels that way. His Free to Choose won over many people to the cause of liberty — as did his Capitalism and Freedom. So, for that matter, did his Free to Choose documentary.

Here’s a good Friedman interview by Tunku Varadarajan, from last summer. And there’s a lot more over at The Corner and at Reason. He did a great interview on Charlie Rose less than a year ago, but I can’t find it anywhere online.

UPDATE: Ah, here it is! Thanks to reader Tom Blumer for the pointer.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The interview is available on DVD, too.

And be sure to read Friedman on the “war on drugs.”

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Much, much more on Friedman here.

Still more Friedman video here and here.

And Fausta writes: “If it weren’t for Milton Friedman, I wouldn’t be a blogger today.” High praise, considering the source!

Virginia Postrel: “He was a great social scientist, a brilliant popularizer and polemicist, and a mensch. His intellectual influence, on both scholarly economics and the revival of classical liberalism, can hardly be overstated. And, more than any other single person, we can thank him for ending the scourges of the 1970s: inflation and the draft.”

But nobody’s perfect: “Somewhat unfortunately, Friedman (at that time still a left-winger) also invented the idea of income tax withholding while working as an economist for the the Treasury Department during World War II. Although Friedman intended it to be a temporary wartime measure, it soon turned into a permanent expansion of government power – a result that the later, libertarian Friedman would surely have predicted:)!”

Here’s the New York Times obituary. And Megan McArdle draws some distinctions.

AS THE TWO POLITICAL PARTIES engage in a “dumb off,” Mary Katharine Ham plays Dr. Phil in the latest Ham Nation. The two parties as different kinds of loser exes . . . .

WHAT TO DO? Democratic reader Fred Lapides emails:

I have seen you (and of course others) sturggle mightily and willingly and idealistically against the rampant pork madness in our congress. And I have seen you now, same day, badmouth Pelosi and Murtha and then, later Trent Lott…all for the same issue.

What is to be done?

What we have is legislators who get and gain and keep power by handouts; and what we also see is that this is the way of the congressional world. Libertarians and/or any other party will not change things, it seems, and the American public know only to change elected officials or parties when they get upset, though when pork comes to voter districts, those voters are hardly going to rebuke the elected officials who got the pork.

Though I have in the past been opposed to term limits–after all, reward good guys and punish bad–limits might be the only way to slow down the pork parade, though, clearly, if I am in for a short term and know I can not get relected no matter what, I might as well grab what I can for those who put me in and a bit for myself. But at least there is the turnover of porkers, a refertilzation that has worked on farmland,and the compost and manure that is spewed by our elected officials perhaps might briefly nurish the soil but then need to be plowed under and a new crop planted.

I’m beginning to view term limits more favorably, too.

HOYER BEATS MURTHA: And it wasn’t even close. Arianna Huffington is unhappy, but I think this is good news for the Democrats. And, probably, for the country. Contra Arianna, though, I don’t see how this can be anything other than a defeat for Nancy Pelosi.

UPDATE: Mickey Kaus: “Pelosi puts her prestige on the line, in a self-conscious display of strong-arm tactics that sound like they were taken from bad movies, and gets creamed. For some reason House Democrats decided they didn’t want an old-school influence jockey who couldn’t string five coherent sentences together without embarrassing himself to be their #2 national spokesman.”

As I say, this is good for the Democrats.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Wonkette: “Steny ‘Slightly Less Corrupt’ Hoyer was elected Majority Leader, beating out John ‘Bribe Me Later’ Murtha. The vote in the Majority Leader race: 149-86. . . . expect to see ‘Dems Divided: Speaker Pelosi’s Leadership Ability Questioned’ pieces in your major papers by sundown.”

Of course, it is a victory for Pelosi in this sense: “The Democrats stepped back from the cliff on this one. Two years of Jack Murtha as a visible symbol of Congressional Dems would have gone a long way toward regaining the [Republican] majority in 2008.”

Guess that Dennis Kucinich endorsement wasn’t enough to put him over the top.