OMRI CEREN is liveblogging Sharon’s medical situation.

2005: NOT SUCH A BAD YEAR AFTER ALL, says Amir Taheri. (Via Gateway Pundit).

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: You can vote for the Porker of the Year in a contest sponsored by Citizens Against Government Waste.

I’LL BE ON NPR’S TALK OF THE NATION in just a minute, talking about the Abramoff case.

UPDATE: The audio is up, with me, Jeralyn Merritt, and Matt Lewis.

FIRST THE KATRINA REPORTING fell apart. Then there was the whole wolf fiasco. Now there’s the misreporting of the trapped-miners story.

If bloggers had made these kinds of mistakes, Big-Media folks would be pointing them out as evidence that the blogosphere can’t be trusted. But where were all those editors, filters, and fact-checkers?

MORE ON ABRAMOFF over at GlennReynolds.com.

UPDATE: Bruce Reed observes: “Ironically, the Contract With America included lobbying reform and a gift ban, along with other institutional changes that Republicans have since left behind.” As I’ve suggested, they’d better rediscover the reasons people sent them in the first place.

Meanwhile, Marc Cooper looks at the Democrats’ role in Indian gaming and finds little to admire.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Tim Chapman has an interview with Mike Pence about budget-cutting efforts in Congress. Pence looks at how the GOP Congress has lost its way:

TC: I just read a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, and I think it was Dick Armey actually who wrote it and calling for another Republican revolution. It almost sounds like that’s what you’re talking about there—a complete reversion, not reversion in a negative way, but a reversion to conservative ideals that brought a bunch of people to the Republicans in 1994.

Pence: Well, I’ll always believe that the experience of November 2003, where this majority allowed for and supported the creation of the first new entitlement since the Great Society in the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill, that we reached something of a turning point. It was in that three-hour vote, the longest vote in Congressional history that many of the relationships that have now become the foundation of the Republican study Committee and its effectiveness were forged during that legislative battle. And if there is any silver lining to Medicare bill and the No Child Left Behind bill was in those defeats. House conservatives were reinvigorated and renewed in their commitment to be more effective in limited government and fiscal discipline. And the successes, however modest, of this year are a direct result of dozens upon dozens members being unwilling to allow government to expand under Republican control.

The Congressional Republicans certainly need to remember why they were sent there. And, as I noted on January 1, there’s a connection between pork and corruption that they would do well to keep in mind. Maybe we should send them all a copy of Size Matters.

IN RESPONSE TO THE NIELSEN HAYDEN POST BELOW, Kevin Menard emails that the problem is more general:

Killing the sales of Vioxx has screwed me and a lot of others. My misspent youth left me with a lot of joint pain and Vioxx made it go away. Period. None of the others seem to work as well. Would I trade increasing risk of heart disease to be able to run with my kids? You bet, especially when you look at the studies and see the odds for those of us otherwise healthy.

A meteorite would be too quick…

Yeah. I’m all for drug safety but I really worry that relatively minor risks are being inflated to kill off important drugs, and that that will chill research into new medicines. And I wonder how Public Citizen would fare if they were held as accountable for their statements and actions as the pharmaceutical companies are for theirs.

MORE ON MICROSOFT AND CHINA, via Forbes.com: “Microsoft is again facing a public relations backlash after a Chinese web blog hosted on its MSN Spaces service was allegedly shut down.”

TERESA NIELSEN HAYDEN: “If Ralph Nader is run over by a beer truck and killed, if a very large meteorite falls on the offices of Public Citizen and vaporizes the lot of them, I won’t feel sorry. Not the least little bit.”

She’s upset because a medicine she depends on to lead a normal life has been taken off the market at their behest. I understand how she feels. My wife’s response to Tikosyn has been something close to a miracle, and if it were taken off the market, I’d wish those responsible dead, too. Though perhaps more slowly and painfully.

UPDATE: Eric S. Raymond is defending Ralph Nader. Well, sort of.

And Derek Lowe weighs in, too.

FASHION ADVICE for Jack Abramoff.

UPDATE: More on Abramoff’s attire from John Podhoretz. It’s the ill-fitting black trenchcoat that does it for me, though.

KEVIN JOHNSON looks at Africans in America, and how they differ from “African-Americans.”

CHRISTINE HURT on the wildfires:

I find it interesting that the media seems so uninterested in the cause of the fires. The media focuses on the high winds, low humidity, drought conditions, and high temperatures, but these are factors that lead to the rapid spread of the fire and the difficulty of containing the fire, not the factors that caused these fires. During Hurricane Katrina, questions were swirling in the media — Why didn’t people evacuate? Why weren’t they forced to evacuate? Who decided to have inferior levees? Who could have prevented this? Why isn’t anyone asking these questions about the Texas fires?

I’m guessing it’s because they can’t see a way to turn it into a partisan political issue.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, Sissy Willis looks at who fanned the fires in a different conflagration.

MELANA ZYLE VICKERS:

Like a flashy celebrity caught smacking his ex-girlfriend in public, Russia’s Vladimir Putin has had to retreat from his decision Sunday to blackmail Ukraine by cutting off the country’s natural gas supplies. Following an outcry from West Europeans, Russia resumed piping 100 percent of the required gas through Ukraine on Tuesday.

The lesson? Length of time autocratic Russia could put the screws to a neighbor in the imperial and Soviet era: decades. Length of time autocratic Russia can put the screws to that neighbor in an era of globalization: three days.

Just as Russia last year discovered it couldn’t hand-pick a communist to serve as the Ukrainian president, it cannot now use gas prices to punish Ukraine for asserting its political independence. The broader lesson for Russia’s neighbors — or any expansionist bully’s neighbors — is that you must integrate in the region beyond you, economically and politically, so that you spend as little time as possible with the bully behind closed doors.

Let’s hope it works out that way in the future.

UGH. School starts back today, which means so does having to get up at 6:30. As one of my colleagues says, the public schools are an evil conspiracy of morning people.

PROF. APPIAH MAKES THE CASE FOR CONTAMINATION:

“They have no real choice,” the cultural preservationists say. “We’ve dumped cheap Western clothes into their markets, and they can no longer afford the silk they used to wear. If they had what they really wanted, they’d still be dressed traditionally.” But this is no longer an argument about authenticity. The claim is that they can’t afford to do something that they’d really like to do, something that is expressive of an identity they care about and want to sustain. This is a genuine problem, one that afflicts people in many communities: they’re too poor to live the life they want to lead. But if they do get richer, and they still run around in T-shirts, that’s their choice. Talk of authenticity now just amounts to telling other people what they ought to value in their own traditions.

Read the whole thing. (Via Ralph Luker).

OKAY, so I’ve been reading Wonkette’s new novel, Dog Days, and so far I like it pretty well. I was never a cute Washington woman having an affair with a major cable pundit, but I did work in a Presidential campaign (Gore, ’88) and much of that stuff rings true. The reviews say that the characterization is thin, and it is, but that may be to illustrate a point: What strikes me so far is that the strongest relationships the characters have are not with each other, but with their electronics: Their laptops, their TiVos, their Blackberries (especially their BlackBerries), etc. Is that contrived? I don’t know. I was talking on the phone today to an attractive 20-something publishing PR woman who’s pretty close to the demographic of the novel’s main character, and she exclaimed: “My laptop is like my lover! I couldn’t imagine living without it!”

Then again, maybe that attitude is explained by this passage: “During an election year, D.C.’s standards of attractiveness — already graded on a generous curve — tracked to availability and not physical beauty. It’s like the Special Olympics of sex, Melanie thought. Everyone’s a winner!”

Unlike the lovers, the laptops get better every year . . . .

UPDATE: And the entire Plame affair is explained by this passage:

“Is it plausible, though?” Melanie twirled a strand of hair, examined it for split ends. “I mean, anything this hot, would there be talk floating around by now?”

“Yes and no.” Julie took on the aspect of a schoolteacher, her syllables clear and slow. “You have to remember, no one here will ever admit that they don’t know something. It’s considered a major faux pas to admit to being uninformed. You tell anyone here the hottest, freshest gossip you have and only the most green intern will say that it’s news. Everyone else is all ‘Oh, right, I heard that, too.’“

Heh. Meanwhile, Wonkette has already got a second book under contract.

MARTIN PERETZ ON GAZA:

You don’t hear much about these bewildering social formations until a long-festering inter-family (or intra-family) feud suddenly erupts and blood is shed, as it has recently with special regularity in Gaza. Journalists and academics somehow think it patronizing to recognize these antiquarian kinship groups with their raw emotions as political actors when their rhetoric strains so pompously to modernity. It would be especially insulting since their Jewish antagonists are the quintessential carriers of progress in the Middle East, those damned Zionists with their advanced science-based economy, independent judiciary, free press, hi-tech military in which individual soldiers still take responsibility and command respect, and promotion in the ranks by competence and ingenuity in the defense activities of the state.

Damn them!

THE CARNIVAL OF HOMESCHOOLING IS UP: (Via who else?)

TOM MAGUIRE HAS a question for James Risen.

THE WSJ LAW BLOG has an Abramoff guilty plea roundup.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has much, much more, with this bottom line: “Abramoff spread his stench across both parties. But principled conservatives must call Abramoff what he is–a sleazebag plain and simple, as I’ve noted before–and condemn his criminal activities unequivocally.”

DAN GILLMOR’S CITIZEN MEDIA CENTER now has a blog, which lists the members of an advisory board that contains numerous eminent and thoughtful people, and me.

THERE’S LOTS OF BLOGOSPHERIC BITCHING about tech-stuff that doesn’t work right, which is why I think it’s important to give credit where credit’s due. I bought a telephone interface box from JK Audio, (it was this one) and when I hooked it up it worked fine except that there was a persistent low-level buzz that I found irritating. I could filter it out (mostly) with the noise-reduction feature on Audition, but that’s a kludge. I tried checking for groundloops, replacing all the cords, isolating the box, etc., but it was still there. I called the company’s number, the woman who answered (on the second ring) told me how to fix it (with a counterintuitive level change), and the problem went away.

If only everything were that easy.

UPDATE: Reader Barry Pike emails:

I’m a JK Audio dealer and you are correct, they are an excellent company. More than once I’ve had Joe Klinger (JK) himself return a call to one of my customers with a timely solution to some bizarre problem or other. He’s a very clever man, to say the least, and his products and customer service are excellent.

You gotta love that. And it deserves praise as much as the problems deserve complaint.

“DESPICABLE, BUT PREDICTABLE:” Greg Djerejian has more on the Gerhard Schroeder deal with Russian energy giant Gazprom.

BILL ROGGIO has a piece in National Review on the Washington Post article that misrepresented his blogging from Iraq.

UPDATE: Some related thoughts from Frank Wilson:

I have myself heard in the newsroom comments about blogs that actually did sound, in Michelle Malkin’s phrase, “thoroughly unhinged.”

But it really isn’t blogging in general that bothers the MSM. It’s only the political blogs. The MSM doesn’t care about lit blogs or cooking blogs or knitting blogs — or even tech blogs or science blogs (except to the extent they might be useful in advancing some editorial viewpoint).

Blogs have challenged the MSM’s self-designated right to shape political debate by choosing what to cover and how to cover it. The MSM claims it has resources not available to bloggers — and it does. So how explain the disparity between what was reported in the papers and on TV during Hurricane Katrina and what we have since determined was actually the case? This was, after all, the demonstration case for the superiority of the MSM.

Yes. And the Roggio case isn’t helping either.