THE CARNIVAL OF HOMESCHOOLING is up. So is the Carnival of Education.

THE NETROOTS AND THE JOHN BIRCHERS: Josh Trevino explores a historical parallel.

CAM EDWARDS REPORTS FROM THE U.N. GUN-BAN SUMMIT: Here’s Day One, and here’s Day Two, where he reports: “A remarkable thing happened at the United Nations yesterday. We, the United States, told the world ‘no’.”

IN THE MAIL: Disrobed, by Mark Smith. As you’ll see if you follow the link, it’s not quite as racy as the title suggests. . . .

THOUGHTS ON PREPARING FOR AVIAN FLU AND OTHER DISASTERS: My TCS Daily column is up.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Over at Porkbusters, it’s a guest post from Sen. John McCain:

So why has my party, the party of small government, lately adopted the practices of our opponents who believe the bigger the government the better? I’m afraid it’s because at times we value our incumbency more than our principles. We came to office to reduce the size of government. Lately, we have increased the size of government in order to stay in office. The editors of National Review have argued — and I agree with them — that unless Republicans curb government spending by reforming the budget process, we may lose our majorities in the House and Senate. I will go one step further and say that if Republicans do not reform our budget process, we will deserve to lose our majorities.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Freeman Hunt looks at the big picture: “I am not a McCain fan, however, at least if McCain is getting behind efforts like Porkbusters, you can guess that there is a shift in momentum going on somewhere in Congress.”

DELL NON-HELL: The Dell Laptop was dead as a doornail tonight. Wouldn’t boot, even in safe mode, producing a stop code and an “Unmountable Boot Device” error message. Called Dell Support, expecting it to be a bad hard drive. Waited more-or-less patiently as they got me to insert the recovery disk and run some diagnostics, and a nice man from Mumbai named (I think) Raktish helped me repair the bad boot sector and then noticed my computer was booting too slowly and took remote control and cleaned up some junk that was slowing things down. Total elapsed time (including about 8 minutes on hold at the beginning): less than an hour. Seems to be working fine now.

A SITE UPGRADE at The Truth Laid Bear.

JONATHAN ADLER looks at the D.C. Circuit and limits on federal power after Raich.

JEFF GOLDSTEIN CONFRONTS HOMOPHOBIA: And is undeterred.

DO THEY HAVE “SWEEPS WEEK” FOR BLOGS? Ana Marie Cox has thoughts on breasts.

ARMED LIBERAL on The New York Times, et al.:

I don’t think that the newspapers are treasonous, or doing this solely in an effort to thwart President Bush (i.e. I don’t think that a Democratic president would be getting a free ride right now). That doesn’t mean that the impacts of what they are doing doesn’t damage the country, put lives at risk, or negatively impact President Bush’s effectiveness.

I think, in simple terms, that they have forgotten that they are citizens, and that they have an obligation to the polity that goes beyond writing the good story. I don’t think they are alone; I think that many people and institutions in the country today have forgotten they are citizens, whether they are poor residents of New Orleans defrauding FEMA or corporate chieftains who are maximizing their bonuses at the expense of a healthy economy.

I think that they’re offended at the notion that citizenship might involve obligations to do something other than what you want to do anyway. Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Jon Henke: “My question is: is there any legal line, any classified information at all, that the press could/should be prevented from, or held legally accountable for, disclosing? And if so, how and where do we draw that line?”

I think we’ve done it already, by statute. We’ve then modified that, rather harsh, line with a lot of unwritten understandings that used to work, but that don’t anymore. I suspect that the New York Times is in theoretical violation of those statutes, but I also doubt that it’s likely to actually be prosecuted. Its reporters may well be subpoenaed and ordered to identify the leakers, but the press enjoys no special privilege against such things. I think the New York Times will also experience considerably more general hostility, and further erosion of its former position as the “newspaper of record” as a result of this behavior, but that seems fair to me.

In the meantime, revoking their press credentials is a far cry from the Gulag. Related thoughts here.

THE FLAGBURNING AMENDMENT has failed, by one vote. Allah: “Now Congress can get back to the important stuff. Like catching pimps.” Or taxing them, anyway.

MICKEY KAUS: “Who said that when it comes to immigration reform it’s the ‘Senate bill or nothing’? It sure looks like Senate conference leader Arlen Specter is moving rapidly, if not desperately, in the House’s ‘enforcement-only’ direction.” He offers suggestions for a face-saving compromise.

NEW GOINGS-ON IN SOMALIA: Austin Bay is paying attention.

SCOTT OLIN SCHMIDT: “By-and-large political campaigns—and even Kos himself—are missing the boat on how political campaigns can leverage the blogosphere.”

UPDATE: On the other hand, there’s this: “I’d say in this little Net Skirmish the final score would be Kos 1 – Hillary Zip.”

FLAGBURNING IDIOCY: I agree with James Taranto:

No doubt you are dying to know where this column stands on the flag-desecration amendment. The answer is, we are against it. Our view is that the Supreme Court got it right in 1989: Insofar as desecrating the flag is an act of political expression, it is protected by the First Amendment. (The objection that it isn’t “speech” is overly literal. What we’re doing now–causing pixels to form meaningful patterns on thousands of computer screens–isn’t exactly speech either, but we like to think the First Amendment protects it from government interference.)

Burning the flag is a stupid and ugly act, but there is something lovely and enlightened about a regime that tolerates it in the name of freedom. And of course it has the added benefit of making it easier to spot the idiots.

Or, to put it more succinctly: “I notice it and just think ugh, they’re doing that again.” Indeed. On the other hand, people who are more upset about a ban on flagburning than about McCain-Feingold are on shaky free-speech ground. Michael Barone looks at that contradiction.

SENATOR PAT ROBERTS, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has written John Negroponte, Director of National Intelligence, and requested a damage assessment regarding the effects of journalistic leaks on national security.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey: “We don’t need a report from Negroponte. We need our elected representatives to start taking national-security leaks seriously. This isn’t even a good start towards that end.”

RYAN SAGER: Beware the Wal-Mart voters.

I wonder if those are anything like the Lou Dobbs voters?

MATT STOLLER defends Jon Stewart.

PATTERICO: “Do you think the editors of the New York Times and L.A. Times are starting to realize what a big mistake they’ve made in publishing classified details of a legal and effective anti-terror program?”

ROGER SIMON: “In all the brouhaha over the New York Times’ publishing top secret information on financial surveillance, one thing amuses me in a dark comic way: from my point of view the Big Scoop is one of the great myths of our post-Watergate times. Almost always it is simply handed to you. It takes no guts whatsoever or even, in many cases, much legwork.”

DAVID BERNSTEIN: “I’ve noticed in a variety of contexts that there are some rather well-educated, articulate individuals out there who have what seems to me to be a fanatical, quasi-religious belief in ‘international law,’ and the idea that it should trump any other conflicting consideration.”

ARMY OF DAVIDS UPDATE: Cato@Liberty reports:

The leadership of the National Chamber Foundation (the educational arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) recently recommended to its board of directors a list of 10 “Books that Drive the Debate.”

One of them was, you guessed it, An Army of Davids. Another was Arnold Kling’s excellent book on health care, Crisis of Abundance.

I’d be interested in hearing what Kling thinks about Andy Kessler’s book.

GRAND ROUNDS is up!

Also the Blawg Review, the Carnival of the Cats, and the Second Amendment Carnival. And if you’re tired of my hit-and-miss approach you can keep up with the carnivals at BlogCarnival.com.