FRONTBURNER IS NOW UP AND RUNNING over at PoliticsCentral, with Claudia Rosett and Ron Rosenbaum posting. More to come.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY: A Katrina video retrospective, at Hot Air.

IN THE MAIL: Obery Hendricks’ The Politics of Jesus : Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus’ Teachings and How They Have Been Corrupted. Just in case you doubted that there’s a Religious Left as well as a Religious Right. I expect that Amazon discussion board to heat up now that the book’s out.

UPDATE: Telford Work emails: “Glenn, whatever the other merits or the demerits of Hendricks’ book, I find it hard to believe that he and Doubleday used the same title as John Howard Yoder’s classic The Politics of Jesus (Eerdmans 1972, rev ed 1994). Surely Hendricks has encountered it studying at Princeton Seminary or at New York Seminary where he now teaches; it is the seminal work on which many of the worthier voices in the ‘Christian left’ now draw. If is as if John Stossel wrote The Wealth of Nations or Stephen Jay Gould wrote The Origin of Species.”

Yes, even I noticed that. It does seem a bit presumptuous.

UPDATE: Some very different thoughts on religion from Richard Fernandez of The Belmont Club.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Daniel Glover has more on the secret hold:

Every August, lawmakers leave Washington for relaxing summer vacations, taxpayer-funded junkets abroad, low-key field hearings and high-dollar fundraisers. In even-numbered years, the few incumbents whose jobs are threatened have more hectic campaign schedules, but for the most part, lawmakers don’t have to answer tough questions in the month whose name is linked to external triumph and internal peace in the Roman Empire.

Not so this August — at least not for the 100 unfortunate souls who happen to hold U.S. Senate seats when bloggers across the political spectrum are in a feisty mood. Those bloggers are hot and bothered not by the temperature and summer humidity but instead by the time-honored Senate tradition known as the “secret hold,” and they are doing their best to break that hold against policymaking accountability.

The procedural hold in this case is on a bill that would create a public, searchable Web site of all federal grants and contracts in an effort to deter pork-barrel spending in lawmakers’ states and districts. Senate tradition allows senators to place such holds anonymously as a way to delay or prevent floor action.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Ted Stevens?

ANOTHER UPDATE: William Beutler has much more on this.

MORE: Dave Weigel: “If earmarking was a 1970s adult film loop, Stevens would be John Holmes. (Robert Byrd could be Harry Reems.)”

So what, does that make Trent Lott Johnny Wadd?

MORE STILL: Reader Bill Gardner writes: “Under the heading of ’embarrassing trivia I shouldn’t know,’ JW and John Holmes are the same person.”

You’re right, Bill. About all of it! And various other readers sent variations on “Please! No posts that cause us to imagine members of the United States Senate naked!” Good point.

MORE ON FAKE NEWS: My TCS Daily column is up.

CRUSHING OF DISSENT, IN CANADA:

I saw the satirical website www.HezboLiberal.com and laughed pretty hard (my favourite line: "MP searches Middle-East for terrorism, finds Israel). But they weren’t laughing over at Liberal headquarters. The party’s in a bit of a snit right now over the issue of Israel and terrorism and they’ve lost their sense of humour.

The grown-up answer to a satirical website like that is to laugh it off. But the Liberal party is hurting right now, so it lashed out against the pranksters — pressuring their internet service provider (ISP) to censor the site.

That’s been their pattern, I believe. It only makes the satirist’s point, of course.

“GERMANS LEAVE IN RECORD NUMBERS, FLEEING UNEMPLOYMENT:” Okay, so it’s not exactly the Potato Famine. But it’s evidence of the problems an overly rigid economy brings.

STUART TAYLOR on the Duke Lacrosse case — and the New York Times’ coverage thereof. “The Times still seems bent on advancing its race-sex-class ideological agenda, even at the cost of ruining the lives of three young men who it has reason to know are very probably innocent.”

HITCHENS ON THE PLAME SCANDAL — which turns out to be scandalous, but not in the way we were told for the past several years:

It turns out that the person who put Valerie Plame’s identity into circulation was a staunch foe of regime change in Iraq. Oh, that’s all right, then. But you have to laugh at the way Corn now so neutrally describes his own initial delusion as one that was “seized on by administration critics.”

What does emerge from Hubris is further confirmation of what we knew all along: the extraordinary venom of the interdepartmental rivalry that has characterized this administration. In particular, the bureaucracy at the State Department and the CIA appear to have used the indiscretion of Armitage to revenge themselves on the “neoconservatives” who had been advocating the removal of Saddam Hussein. Armitage identified himself to Colin Powell as Novak’s source before the Fitzgerald inquiry had even been set on foot. The whole thing could—and should—have ended right there. . . .

And can one imagine anybody with a stronger motive to change the subject from CIA incompetence and to present a widely discredited agency as, instead, a victim, than Tenet himself? The man who kept the knowledge of the Minnesota flight schools to himself and who was facing every kind of investigation and obloquy finally saw a chance to change the subject. If there is any “irony” in the absurd and expensive and pointless brouhaha that followed, it is that he was abetted in this by so many who consider themselves “radical.”

Yes. And some of us were skeptical a long time ago. But this only makes Bush look bad for his failure to fire Tenet — and to roll some other heads at the CIA — shortly after 9/11.

PORKBUSTERS AND THE “SECRET SENATOR” STORY were on CNN tonight. Hot Air has the video.

THE FEC CRACKS DOWN ON CAMPAIGN SPEECH: Mark Tapscott thinks it’s a serious blow to McCain’s campaign.

I agree. Despite his efforts to court bloggers, this will remind ’em that he got us into this mess.

And the whole campaign finance “reform” thing was astroturfed, anyway.

A HIT-AND-RUN SPREE in San Francisco:

As many as 14 people were injured this afternoon by a motorist who drove around San Francisco running them down before he was arrested, authorities said.

Seven of those injured were in critical condition, police and firefighters said.

Authorities have identified the man who was arrested as Omeed Aziz Popal, who has addresses in Ceres (Stanislaus County) and Fremont.

We need car-control. But anybody can buy one of those things, without even a background check or a waiting period. (Via LGF).

UPDATE: A terrorist attack? It does seem a bit reminiscent of the “Jeep jihadi.” Well, to look on the bright side, better crashing cars into people than planes into buildings, I guess.

MORE: Gateway Pundit has a roundup. Reportedly, three other people have been taken in for questioning.

And Bill Quick warns people not to get carried away with speculation in advance of the data. Good advice, as always — especially since, as Dan Riehl notes, Popal seems to have had traffic-court problems before.

Meanwhile, a few readers say that we do require licenses for cars. Not exactly. As Dave Kopel notes, licensing for cars is much, much looser than the regulation surrounding guns. People who think otherwise are mistaken.

CATHY YOUNG COUNTS THE WAYS that welfare-reform critics turned out to be wrong.

Plus, Mickey Kaus comments:

The purpose of welfare reform wasn’t to lower the poverty rate. It was to move people from welfare to work–out of an isolated, non-working subculture that had all sorts of bad social effects (fatherless families, crime, segregation, etc.). If welfare reform could have done that with a small increase in the poverty rate, that would have been a price worth paying. If reform had accomplished this goal–a near-60% reduction in the families getting welfare**–with no increase in the poverty rate, that would be a victory. That the poverty rate has actually fallen a full point from 1996 (13.7% then to 12.6% now–an 8% reduction) is a significant success. … P.S.: The black poverty rate has fallen from 28.4% in 1996 to 24.9% in 2005, a 12% drop. In 1993, when Clinton took office, it was 33.1%. Since then it has dropped by almost 25%. …

Sounds like a success.

BILL FRIST on PorkBusters and the “secret Senator.”

UPDATE: Tim Chapman, meanwhile, offers a defense of secret holds.

MORE: Frist promises to take S.2590, the earmark reform bill, to the floor.

SOME THOUGHTS ON DISPROPORTIONATE RESPONSE, from Steven den Beste.

AN INCUMBENT PROTECTION ACT? Pretty much.

AMERICA’S MUSLIMS: “Not as assimilated as you think.”

UPDATE: Aziz Poonawalla says “yes we are!”

ANOTHER UPDATE: I got several emails from American Muslim readers, along the lines of this one:

You’ve probably gotten a lot of responses like this, but I feel I must add to the chorus. American muslims are definitely integrated and as fully American as any other ethnic group. More so than many groups, in fact. The blindingly obvious difference with European muslims is that American muslims have not had the same job and class racism as exists in Europe and are for the most part have been able to reach the middle or upper classes. In fact, about 60% of all Americans of middle-eastern descent are college educated, compared to about 40% of all immigrants, and 25.9% of all U.S. citizens … My own ethnic group, Americans of Egyptian descent, have about 80% college graduation rates. Hardly a poor, uneducated, unassimilated underclass.

This seems right to me, and I hope it is.

MEARSHEIMER AND WALT: Idiots, or anti-semites?

Do I have to choose?

MORE FAUXTOGRAPHY: Katie Couric gets a touchup. Okay, it’s more than just a touchup. But you can trust her and CBS to present the unvarnished truth on the air!

UPDATE: More here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: And here’s more confidence-inspiring journalism from CBS.

MORE: But see this.

IN THE MAIL: Marvin Olasky’s The Politics of Disaster: Katrina, Big Government, and A New Strategy for Future Crises.

“HOW DARE HE DEMAND WE TELL THE TRUTH!”

Australia’s Foreign Minister Alexander Downer has criticized “dishonest” media coverage of the conflict in Lebanon.

In an address to the National Newspaper Publishers Conference, Downer denied media claims his ministry had been slow in providing assistance to thousands of Lebanese-Australian passport holders, The Australian newspaper reported.

“What concerns me greatly is the evidence of dishonesty in the reporting out of Lebanon,” he said. He gave as examples the case of photographs of the results of Israeli air strikes being altered and the “tendency to report every casualty on the Lebanese side of the conflict as a civilian casualty, despite indisputable evidence that many of the injured from the Israeli offensive were Hezbollah combatants,” Downer said.

The secretary of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, Chris Warren, says Downer’s remarks showed an unfortunate but increasing trait of governments to try and dictate conflict reporting.

If any other industry were doing as much public harm by producing a similarly substandard product, the press would be screaming for the government to take action.

UPDATE: More here.

SECRET SENATOR UPDATE: Andy Roth has a poll letting readers vote on their top suspect in the “secret hold” case. At the moment, Ted Stevens enjoys a slim lead. Well, maybe not enjoys, exactly.

HOWARD KURTZ: “Will every anchor, correspondent and producer who shamelessly hyped the John Mark Karr story now apologize for taking the country for a ride? Don’t hold your breath. . . . Karr was a fake, and the media caravan moves on. But I don’t think the public forgets. They should teach this one in journalism schools for a long time.”

I’m not expecting much in the way of apologies for the Plame story, either.

UPDATE: Heh. This photo says it all.

A YEAR LATER, Hurricane-blogger Brendan Loy looks back at Katrina, and talks about what we’ve learned.

UPDATE: Bob Owens says we shouldn’t be rebuilding New Orleans: “We should have learned; you don’t build a major city in a hole in a swamp surrounded by the Mighty Mississippi on the one side and the Gulf of Mexico on the other and expect it to last.”