FRANK J. INTERVIEWS A 9/11 CONSPIRACY THEORIST who happens to be running for Congress.

Related item here.

HILLARY CLINTON believes that torture should be safe, legal, and rare, according to this report. “Torture is OK as long as the president approves it, as long as it’s an exception, and as long as it’s secretly reported to Congress. That doesn’t sound like a bright moral line to me.”

I guess she’s been reading the polls. (Via Alarming News).

ROBERT COX writes in The Examiner that the Left is on the way to owning the Internet the way the Right owns talk radio.

Except that the Right doesn’t own the infrastructure for talk radio.

UPDATE: Hmm. I feel sorry for Google shareholders — no sooner do they buy YouTube than they seem to be flushing its value away.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Stuart Gittelman has a different take:

YouTube definitely has problems with sending conservative videos to the cornfield, but in this case, I think the real concept at plays is a tangent to the Army of Davids paradigm.

It appears from the notice that the Associate Press got YouTube to pull the video over copyright issues. Fair enough, that’s their right. But it reflects the AP’s total “old media” approach: this is our toy and no one plays with our toys in our sandbox unless we say so. But look at FoxNews, for instance. How many little snippets quite like the one the AP is clutching like Linus’ security blanket did they allow Ian Schwartz at The Political Teen to post knowing the free, viral marketing they got out of it burnished their credentials. And that’s just one fr’instance.

The bottom line is that one embraced the technology and the Davids. They’re doing pretty well. The other is still trying to play Goliath. I suppose that’s good work if you can get it…but only while it lasts.

Very interesting.

THE MANOLO ON CONGRESS: “The Pageboy is to be the hairstyle, not the pen-pal.”

THOUGHTS ON NORTH KOREA from Victor Davis Hanson.

PRESIDENT BUSH WILL SLEEP BETTER TONIGHT: Mickey Kaus pronounces himself satisfied regarding the White House’s intentions on the fence bill.

IT’S LIEBERMAN 53, LAMONT 40, according to SurveyUSA.

TREASONOUS SPEECH IN SUPPORT OF ENEMY POWERS: Tom Bell has thoughts on the Gadahn indictment:

A treason charge in the War on Terror? Who would have thought of that? Well, um, I would have. Indeed, I wrote a law review article on the topic: Treason, Technology, and Freedom of Expression, 37 Ariz. St. L. J. 999 (2005) [PDF] (that link offers a late draft of the paper, which I plan to soon replace with the published version). As I said there, “Courts have already held that an American employed as an enemy propagandist may justly suffer prosecution for treason. Any American employed as a propagandist by the al-Qaeda terrorist network would doubtless risk the same fate.” Id. at 1004.

I must admit, though, that I did not expect U.S. officials to finger an actual agent of al-Quaeda.

As usual, Bell is farther ahead of the curve than even he knows. Some further thoughts on the subject from Eugene Volokh.

A SUMMARY OF THE HARRY REID LAND DEAL, over at The New Editor.

Sounds like pretty standard semi-sleazy local politics, except for his failure to report the deal to Congress. But it’s probably true that if a Republican were involved it would be getting a lot more attention.

UPDATE: Who am I kidding? It’s undoubtedly true that if a Republican were involved it would be getting a lot more attention. At least between now and election day.

MAKING MARCONI PROUD, one taxpayers’ grant at a time.

HERE’S ANOTHER REPORT that Mark Warner won’t be running in 2008. We were supposed to do a podcast interview with him and the date kept slipping — I don’t know if that means that he’s been uncertain about running for a while or not. When I talked to him on the phone in June he said he wasn’t sure if he was running, but I took that with a grain of salt — they all say that — but I guess he really wasn’t sure. A politician who tells the truth? No wonder he’s bowing out . . . .

IN RESPONSE TO MY EARLIER SNARK about intelligence agencies, reader Paul Stinchfield suggests replacing the CIA with one of these.

Well, it would be cheaper. It “has all the answers you need.” And it wouldn’t meddle in domestic politics.

Seriously, I know that gathering intelligence about closed, totalitarian countries is hard. But the CIA has a lousy track record, and there’s no clear sign that anything’s being done to make it better.

ROBERT NOVAK looks at pork for defense — and the defense of pork:

In a caucus of Republican senators, 82-year-old, six-term Sen. Ted Stevens charged that freshman Sen. Tom Coburn’s anti-pork crusade hurts the party. Stevens then removed from the final version of the Defense Department appropriations bill Coburn’s “report card” requiring the Pentagon to grade earmarks. The House passed, 394 to 22, the bill, stripped of this reform and containing some 2,800 earmarks worth $11 billion. That made a mockery of a “transparency” rule passed by the House earlier this year, supposedly intended to discourage earmarks.

“You would think that with a war and all the controversy surrounding earmarks that the appropriators would hold back a little,” said Steve Ellis of the non-partisan Taxpayers for Common Sense. “But with an election just weeks away, they dug into the trough to find pearls to send home to their districts.” Ellis located unauthorized spending embedded in the bill that was harder to find than ever. Republicans in Congress seem unaffected by their conservative base’s anger over pork.

Stevens, the Senate’s president pro tempore and its senior Republican, reflects a majority in both parties defending pork.

That last bit is the most depressing point. It’s insiders vs. outsiders, not Democrats vs. Republicans, and however the elections go things aren’t likely to change much because of party shifts. We need outside pressure, something that’s just beginning. We need to ratchet things up next session, whoever’s in charge.

MICHAEL TOTTEN’S The Hezbollah War is now available through Amazon. This would be good for a class assignment.

MARK WARNER is expected to announce that he won’t run in 2008, according to the Hotline blog. That’s too bad. I was actually hoping for a Warner/Giuliani race, as something that might defuse the polarization a bit.

CONTINUING A TRACK RECORD OF DECADES, the intelligence community appears to have gotten its North Korea predictions all wrong.

Can’t say I’m surprised. Maybe I’ll send ’em one of these — they seem to be the target market . . . .

JOURNALISM PROFESSOR BOB STEPNO wonders if Editor and Publisher is stealing stories. Even if they’ve got a content-sharing agreement (which isn’t clear), crediting a story to “E&P Staff” seems a bit dubious if it comes from somewhere else. How about the old standby “compiled from wire reports” instead? (Via Michael Silence).

AUSTIN BAY notes the emergence of revisionist history on missile defense.

Plus, a problem for China: “Kim’s nuke test publicly exposes China’s failure — a major power’s failure on its own border.”

AN INTERESTING LOOK at nuclear detection technology and how it works.

MICKEY KAUS is still worried that Bush won’t sign the fence bill. But this email from Tony Snow would seem to settle the question: “The president hasn’t signed the bill because it hasn’t arrived from Capitol Hill. When it arrives, he’ll sign.”

Seems pretty clear to me.

JOSH MANCHESTER: “Kim Jong Il is not your average individual. Anyone who was raised to think of his father as a god is not going to fit in well at your average high school reunion. But persistent attempts to portray him as ‘crazy’ in popular discourse are both inaccurate and dangerous.”

CLAUDIA ROSETT: Expel North Korea from the U.N.

VOTER FRAUD IN ST. LOUIS: AP reports:

Election officials say hundreds of potentially bogus registration cards, including ones for dead and underage people, were submitted by a branch of a national group that has been criticized in the past for similar offenses.

At least 1,500 potentially fraudulent registration cards were turned in by the St. Louis branch of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, leading up to Wednesday’s registration deadline for the Nov. 7 election, said Kim Mathis, chairwoman of the St. Louis City Board of Election Commissioners.

Invalid registrations solicited by ACORN workers included duplicate or incomplete ones, a 16-year-old voter, dead people registering, and forged signatures, Mathis said.

“Fifteen hundred may not sound like a lot, but it is a big deal and it disenfranchises the election process,” she said. “It’s time someone be prosecuted. There’s a lot of taxpayer dollars being wasted on this.”

St. Louis-based Gateway Pundit has a roundup. This just underscores John Fund’s point.

BLOG-BLOCKING by Uncle Sam?

ANDREW STUTTAFORD WRITES:

I’ve finally got round to my emails on the topic of that Internet gambling/national security bill and there are far, far too many to reply to. No-one who wrote to me was a fan of the move and there were a good few that said this was the ‘last straw’ so far as their November vote was concerned. Most of the opposition to the law was on broadly libertarian grounds, but there was another strain too, which made interesting reading in the light of Congress’ reputation at the moment.

Supposedly, the reason (apart, of course, from national security) that Senator Frist rushed through this legislation was to send a signal to the more moralistic voters out there. Maybe that will work, maybe it will not, but a revealingly large percentage of my correspondents felt that the real reason for passing the law was to protect the interests of Las Vegas, Indian tribes and other entrenched gambling interests. In other words, a piece of law designed to make the GOP look clean has made them look even dirtier than before.

Of all the uses of the Internet, gambling seems to me to be among the stupidest — I mean, the roulette wheel at the casino might be rigged, but the one flickering on your computer screen? How could you ever tell? — but people are allowed to be stupid. It was a bad bill, and whether or not its purpose was corrupt it stunk. If it was also a political misjudgment, well, that’s pretty much par for the course with this Congress, I’m afraid. I’m with Barney Frank on this one.

UPDATE: An email from Radley Balko. Balko writes:

On Internet gambling — the overwhelming majority of web wagers are on poker. And all of the major poker sites are heavily regulated and publicly traded (most on the London Stock Exchange). Watchdog groups routinely test them for fairness with dummy accounts that measure the randomness of the cards dealt. The major sites also all have pretty sturdy child protection measures, and some even allow for built-in limits if you don’t trust yourself with your money.

Of course, as soon as the bill passed, most of the major sites announced they’d cease doing business with U.S. consumers. I’m sure they’re scared to death now that DOJ is plucking overseas gaming execs out of airports and tossing them in prison (one wonders what kind of implications this will have for American travelers overseas). This means that the 95% of players who gamble recreationally and responsibly are now out of luck. But if you’re a curious minor or an addict, there are still plenty of sites that aren’t publicly traded, and aren’t regulated by Canada or the U.K. There’s also no telling who’s operating them, and there’s no recourse if they take your money. Those sites will almost certainly seee an uptick in traffic as a result of this dumb law.

I hope Stuttaford’s email pans out. This was paternalistic, big government moralizing at its worst. It’s sympomatic of what’s wrong with the GOP. That First slapped it onto a port security bill just hours before Congress was set to end the session and go home makes it all the more dubious. And that’s not even touching the carve-outs in the bill exempting state lotteries (which studies show are much more addictive than poker) and politically-powerful interests like horse racing.

The kicker is that the bill’s champion in the house — Bob Goodlatte — sits on the Internet Caucus, a group that’s supposed to keeping government regulation off the web.

I enjoy playing poker with real people, but I’ve never really had the gambling jones. Still, if people want to waste their money on this stuff, it’s nobody’s business but their own.