SALAFISM as a utopian ideology.

LEGAL ACTION AGAINST LEAKERS: No, not of national security data, but of really important stuff — information about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Plus, bonus anti-blogger spin:

This is all part of the blog culture where people are stealing pictures from photographers and agencies and putting them on the Internet.

Yes, it’s that damn Internet. Because magazines never steal photos from bloggers. . . .

HEY, IF YOU WANT VOTES, you have to go where the voters are: “Recruiters for the Democratic National Committee sought to sign up new supporters outside of a Washington, DC strip club, Camelot, today’s issue of ROLL CALL reports.”

A LOOK AT NONCHALANCE, and the attacks that didn’t happen.

THE ANTI-GAY MARRIAGE AMENDMENT HAS DIED, and this AP lede shows why it was not only wrong, but stupid: “The Senate on Wednesday rejected a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, dealing a defeat to President Bush and Republicans who hoped to use the measure to energize conservative voters on Election Day.”

DAN RIEHL notes an excellent sign from Canada.

IN THE MAIL: David Danelo’s book, Blood Stripes: The Grunt’s View of the War in Iraq. It looks pretty good, and has a foreword by Steven Pressfield, whose Thermopylae novel Gates of Fire was very good.

CLIVE DAVIS: “No, I’m not trying to minimize the awfulness of what is said to have happened at Haditha. But I don’t care, either, for the lip-smacking, self-flagellating tone of some of the coverage.” Neither do I.

Read the whole thing for some historical perspective.

THE LATEST NANO-HYSTERIA COLLAPSES: I talk about the implications for nanotechnology generally in my TCS Daily column.

YES, this radio-controlled airplane video is genuinely amazing.

THE D.C. EXAMINER EDITORIALIZES that Bush and the Congressional Republicans should shelve the Marriage Amendment in favor of actually doing, you know, their jobs. And, unlike me, they actually support the idea. This is really shaping up as another ham-handed political effort that’s likely to prove a debacle.

JEFF GOLDSTEIN faces a moral dilemma.

JUDGE ROY MOORE is a loser in Alabama.

FROM COLD WAR “CONTAINMENT” TO A “FORWARD STRATEGY OF FREEDOM:” Austin Bay looks at where we’re going.

JIM WOOTEN:

For the life of me, I haven’t heard anything from any national Democrat that leads me to believe they’ve cracked the code on the South. Poor U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman tried — and for his efforts, he gets primary opposition from the left. For now, the national party seems to be attempting to build a majority on the terrorist threat that global warming represents and on opposition to tax cuts and Iraq. Won’t sell down here, folks.

Democrats could have a chance if they had a voice that inspired confidence on national security, if they presented a credible alternative to big-spending Republicans, and if they could be trusted to do anything domestically other than grow government. Get there and the Dems could win in the South.

He’s asking for reader input on what the Democrats should be doing.

A BILBRAY VICTORY IN CALIFORNIA: “A former Republican congressman narrowly beat his Democratic rival early Wednesday for the right to fill the House seat once held by jailed Randy “Duke” Cunningham, a race closely watched as a possible early barometer of next fall’s vote. . . . The race – one of dozens of contests Tuesday in eight states – was viewed by Democrats as an opportunity to capture a solidly Republican district and build momentum on their hopes to capture control of the House.”

I tend to think that special elections are generally less important as barometers than punditry usually suggests. I suspect that will be the Democratic line today, too. . . .

UPDATE: A reader emails that this makes the Kos Krowd 0 for 20. I haven’t been counting — can this be right?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Mike Krempasky thinks that’s wrong, and it’s 0 for 19:

Well – here’s 0-16 in 2004, if you count John Kerry

http://www.redstate.com/story/2004/11/3/52646/0368

Then you have Hackett, Ciro, and Busby.

I don’t guess it makes a big difference either way.

Meanwhile, Patrick Hynes comments on the result, and the media treatment. “It would have been quite a different story had liberal Democrat Francine Busby pulled it off, but she was probably never as close as the polls made her out to be. Please recall that it is a central thesis of this blog that the polls are not measuring public opinion appropriately and the resultant exaggerated level of expectation is causing disappointed liberals to go nuts.”

MORE: Dave Weigel emails:

In fairness, Kos won big in the Montana Democratic primary last night. Since the month after the presidential election he had been loudly supporting Jon Tester, a liberal state senator and organic rancher, to challenge Republican Sen. Conrad Burns. The Democratic establishment supported John Morrison, the more moderate state auditor. Morrison was backed by more DC Democratic consultants and led big in early polling. He started to lose ground after a sex scandal, but the last poll on May 28 showed him edging Tester by one point. Last night Tester beat him, and it wasn’t even close. It was a 25-point landslide.

So Kos picked and loudly supported a candidate who won last night. Of course, what does it say that Kos’ biggest success has come from beating a conservative Democrat with a liberal one in a primary?

It says he’s got some distance to go yet. Still, 1-19 is better than 0-20!

ANN ALTHOUSE: “First, fire all the law clerks.”

When I was a law clerk, I sometimes imagined I was indispensable. I’m pretty sure that I was wrong, and even then I had my doubts.

THE LONDON TIMES mislabelled a photograph, but I agree that some critics are attacking the wrong target.

BLOGOMETER: “It’s official, nobody in the blogosphere like the Federal Marriage Amendment.” Since, as I said earlier, it’s nothing but a (lame and ineffectual) pander, I haven’t had much to say about it besides, well, that.

CLONING UPDATE:

Stepping into a research area marked by controversy and fraud, Harvard University scientists said Tuesday they are trying to clone human embryos to create stem cells they hope can be used one day to help conquer a host of diseases.

“We are convinced that work with embryonic stem cells holds enormous promise,” said Harvard provost Dr. Steven Hyman.

The privately funded work is aimed at devising treatments for such ailments as diabetes, Lou Gehrig’s disease, sickle-cell anemia and leukemia. Harvard is only the second American university to announce its venture into the challenging, politically charged research field.

Good for them. As I’ve noted before, and, in fact, in the very earliest days of InstaPundit, I find the Bush Administration’s position on this neither defensible nor terribly honest.

MAYBE THE CRITICISM IS HAVING AN EFFECT:

JUN. 6 7:19 P.M. ET Google Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin acknowledged Tuesday the dominant Internet company has compromised its principles by accommodating Chinese censorship demands. He said Google is wrestling to make the deal work before deciding whether to reverse course.

Meeting with reporters near Capitol Hill, Brin said Google had agreed to the censorship demands only after Chinese authorities blocked its service in that country. Google’s rivals accommodated the same demands — which Brin described as “a set of rules that we weren’t comfortable with” — without international criticism, he said.

“We felt that perhaps we could compromise our principles but provide ultimately more information for the Chinese and be a more effective service and perhaps make more of a difference,” Brin said.

Read the whole thing.

PAUL CAMPOS MAKES NO SENSE: At least, I don’t quite understand how my agreeing with Peter Beinart about Haditha and the importance of bringing offenders to justice makes me a “Bush dead-ender” and a “jingoistic right-wing ideologue.”

Perhaps, nowadays, all that’s necessary for that is to regard My Lai with something less than nostalgia. Since, unlike Campos, I’ve actually helped to call attention to war crimes by U.S. troops that the Big Media failed to notice, I think I’ll just add Campos to the rather large list of newspaper columnists who lack moral and intellectual seriousness on the war.

Meanwhile, unlike Campos, Roger Fraley has actually read what I’ve written about Haditha. And — even more unlike Campos — he appears to have understood it.

Campos, meanwhile, might read Michael Yon on the subject. And perhaps ruminate a bit on the presumption of innocence. (Via Hugh Hewitt, who I gather had Campos on his show tonight.)

UPDATE: Here’s the Hewitt transcript. Campos seems to have trouble pointing to any actual, you know, evidence to support his propositions. I guess we should be glad he’s a law professor and not a prosecutor. Hewitt, on the other hand, seems pretty good at cross-examination.

Hey, I should just be glad Campos didn’t call me the Antichrist.

HIJACKING HADITHA: Michael Yon writes:

In the absence of clear facts, most people know that a rush to judgment serves no one. What word, then, properly characterizes the recent media coverage of Haditha, when analysis stretches beyond shotgun conclusions to actually attributing motive and assigning blame? No rational process supports a statement like: “We don’t know what happened, but we know why it happened and whose fault it is.”

Read the whole thing, for a more sensible view than I’ve seen most anywhere else.

BARRY GOLDWATER WAS A NEOCON? Who knew?

MAKING HYDROGEN on the cheap.