AIR AMERICA: The strong, silent type. “One might have thought that the same tsunami of voter anger that is going to sweep away the Republican Party and all its works this fall might have prompted a few people to tune in.”

NIDRA POLLER REPORTS on the Al Dura trial in France.

BILL FRIST LAUNCHES BloggingforBolton.com, a site designed to get John Bolton confirmed.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: The earmark reform legislation has passed the House (identical legislation was already passed in the Senate) so it’s now heading to the President’s desk. Here’s an email from the Majority Whip’s office:

WASHINGTON—Legislation championed by House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (Mo.) and Government Reform Chairman Tom Davis (Va.) to increase budget accountability and transparency by establishing a public database to track federal grants and contracts passed the House tonight by voice vote. . . .

The federal government awards approximately $300 billion in grants to roughly 30,000 different organizations annually. Each year, roughly one million contracts exceed the $25,000 reporting threshold. The Blunt-Davis bill will ensure that those expenditures are readily accessible to the media, the public, and Members of Congress.

The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act will:

Eliminate Wasteful Spending by empowering everyone with access to the internet to begin reviewing federal grants and other forms of taxpayer assistance for waste, fraud, and abuse;

Ensure Compliance with Federal Law by requiring grantees to also disclose their subgrantees, and

Ensure Compliance with Lobbying Restrictions by identifying entities receiving federal grants that would be subject to lobbying restrictions in existing law.

With House passage of S. 2590, the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, and the enrollment correction containing the House-Senate compromise agreement, the final bill will now go to the president for his signature.

It’s not the end of the fight against pork, but it’s certainly a very significant step. Congratulations to everyone involved!

A TRANSCRIPTION FIRM sent us a transcript of our Bob Corker podcast as a “free sample.” I’ve added it to the original post, if anyone’s interested.

If this is the sort of thing you’d like to see on a regular basis, let me know.

WHAT’S IN A NAME? Pajamas Media is looking for a name to describe voters who don’t fall into conservative / liberal pigeonholes. There’s a contest, and a cool prize. Details here.

MONTREAL SCHOOL SHOOTING: Sari Stein was in the area and has been live-blogging. “It seems from the initial reports that the today’s episode bears more resemblance to the Columbine shootings and to the subsequent and oft-forgotten shooting at a high school in Taber, Alberta than to the previous Montreal shootings, but that probably won’t stop anyone from drawing parallels and from suggesting that school shootings are something of an epidemic here in Montreal, despite the rarity of these episodes.” And there’s a big blog roundup here, too.

KEEP YOUR GRUBBY MITTS OFF MY HARD DRIVE: My TCS Daily column is up.

SONG OF MYSELF: Patterico looks at sock-puppetry.

JIM MEIGS AND DAVID DUNBAR OF POPULAR MECHANICS appeared on PBS to debate the Loose Change folks regarding 9/11 conspiracy theories.

You can see the video here.

ANDREW STUTTAFORD: Buy Afghan opium.

MICKEY KAUS looks at Republicans on the march to stop Bush.

LT SMASH visits with Code Pink and reports that they don’t really like soldiers that much.

DID SYRIA FAKE THE DAMASCUS EMBASSY ATTACK? Regardless, why are we putting up with these bozos?

BRAD SMITH TO RUSS FEINGOLD: Yes, you’re censoring political speech. Somebody send a copy to John McCain, too.

IS NORTH KOREA NEAR COLLAPSE? “North Korea’s potential for anarchy vastly exceeds that of Iraq’s. Iraq is not going to suffer a general breakdown of its urban economy—sending millions into the surrounding country-side to live and die as hunter-gatherers. But North Korea has somehow survived at the edge of that nightmare scenario for nearly two decades. And it has nukes.”

UPDATE: Skepticism, and further information, here. Also here.

LICENSE TO KILL: A look at military contractors in Iraq and elsewhere. Plus, robots in the operating room.

TAEGAN GODDARD notices the Tennessee Senate race, which at a statistical dead heat is closer than you’d think from the small amount of attention it’s gotten.

I’m on the road, by the way, and will be blogging and responding to email at a slower than usual pace.

UPDATE: Here’s more polling on the race from RealClearPolitics. Ford is ahead by 3 in the latest poll, the first time he’s outpolled Corker by any margin.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The NRA has endorsed Corker. SayUncle is a bit hard on Corker’s second amendment statements — he was taken by surprise when we asked him about nationwide concealed carry, but I’m not shocked that he wasn’t ready for that question, and he was positive, though a bit tentative, in his support for it.

BRADFORD PLUMER DEFENDS PORK: “Without pork, activist government would wither and die.”

Color me unpersuaded, on a number of levels. . . .

UPDATE: Capt. Ed observes: “Plumer’s argument amounts to an admission that the kind of big-government, intrusive spending that will come from perennial policy stands of progressives has no chance of succeeding through democratic means. The only way in which single-payer health care and greater federal protections for unions can ever pass is to have a built-in bribery mechanism to sway enough votes . . . I agree with him on that point, and it demonstrates the corrosive nature of pork better than anything I’ve previously written.”

JIM MEIGS ON 9/11: “In every single case, we found that the very facts used by conspiracy theorists to support their fantasies are mistaken, misunderstood or deliberately falsified.”

More here.

RYAN SAGER LAUNCHES The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians and the Battle to Control the Republican Party, with an impressive array of blurbs. (Blurbers?)

You can read the first chapter for free here.

AVOIDING WORLDWIDE CATASTROPHE: James Lovelock thinks that nuclear power is vital. “We live in a nuclear-powered universe. We’re the oddballs by getting energy from burning carbon.”

STEPHEN GREEN says I’m underestimating the Islamist threat. I don’t know — I’m just tired of all the bloggers going on about how we’re doomed. We’re not. See the comment by Major John.

UPDATE: James Joyner joins the discussion.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More from Dadmanly.

BUSH, SADDAM, AND 9/11: William Sjostrom asks, “Is the Guardian really this incompetent, that neither its reporter nor its editors pay attention to their own stories, or is something else going on?”