IN THE MAIL: David J. Moser’s Moser on Music Copyright. It’s aimed at non-lawyers.

THOUGHTS ON comments and civility.

SALON stands up against the hate:

This afternoon, the Huffington Post ran a blurb on this weekend’s Colorado wedding of NBC correspondent Campbell Brown, 37, and Fox News analyst and GOP strategist Dan Senor, 34.

Below are some of the comments posted by HuffPo readers in response to the two-paragraph item:

randomizer37: “Oh my God, is he f*cking ugly! Yet more proof that women are whores!”

Vaughn: “That guy looks like a f*cking bug … He has the job of a cockroach … She probably f*cked several TV execs to get where she is now.” . . .

SBJack: “At her age she has to take what she can get … even if it is gay and younger than she is. Desperate Housewife, indeed.”

AllAmerican: “How appropriate … BEAVER CREEK.”

Jackalheadedgod: “Yeah, and what’s her name, the brunette on CNN, had personal knowledge of Limbaugh’s butt cyst until she took a blow to the head recently.”

Joel: “Ugly dress. Only a gay Republican would marry a woman in a dress that ugly.”

Let’s hear it for those on the left who dismiss a man they don’t like by calling him “gay,” and who take a woman down a couple of notches by throwing around the word “whore” and labeling her ugly, old and desperate. No wonder they hate Senor’s Republican ties so much; Republicans are mean and intolerant people.

Indeed.

A NEW opponent for Cynthia McKinney?

UPDATE: Here’s video of McKinney on CNN last night.

WHEN YOUR MOVIE TANKS, blame the Puritans. Never allow for the possibility that it just sucked like a bilge pump: “Usually when you want a movie to be so bad it’s funny, you can count on someone connected to the Basic Instinct franchise. Alas, they have let even their extremely forgiving audience down. . . . Few expected Basic Instinct 2 to be very good, but no one expected it to be this boring. . . . In this erotic-free film, as the dead bodies pile up, nothing is more dead than the movie itself.”

Interestingly, those are the presumably more sophisticated and less Puritanical critics. The presumably less sophisticated viewers mostly hate it too, but they don’t hate it as much. Puritanism, where is thy sting?

UPDATE: Jim Treacher offers a pungent response: “It’s not that people don’t feel like paying 20 bucks and sitting through 2 hours of ‘sexy’ dreck just to get to the good part that they can see on the Internet tomorrow anyway. It’s not that you’ve, I dunno, shot your wad?”

BILL COSBY offers advice on New Orleans reconstruction.

SEAN HACKBARTH reports that A.N.S.W.E.R. is behind the immigration protests.

MICKEY KAUS: “Frist sure seems clumsy, but, um, wasn’t his ‘nuclear option’ threat, in the end, kind of successful? Kind of wildly successful?”

TOM DELAY is resigning his seat. I’m not sorry. His “no fat in the budget” remark lost me, and I was never much of a fan.

“BUSH WAS RIGHT:” An amusing music video by The Right Brothers that you probably won’t see on MTV. Lyrics here, purchase the song here. “France wrong — Zell Miller right.” You don’t hear rock lyrics like that much.

UPDATE: Related thoughts here.

THE NEW YORK TIMES makes another unforced error in reporting from Iraq.

HUGO CHAVEZ BLOWBACK? “Calderon rose in the polls exactly after the conservative PAN Party ran newspaper campaign ads showing great big vulgar pictures of Hugo Chavez making sneering remarks about President Vicente Fox shortly after the Summit of the Americas in Argentina. The obnoxiousness, the uncouth talk about lapdogs, and the disrespectful behavior of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez was apparently enough to affect Mexican voter sentiment – boosting the anti-Chavez right – as Mexican voters decided they had no intention of being pushed around.”

PUBLIUS looks at political developments in Iraq.

WIN A TRIP TO SPACE, via the contest at Space-shot.com. Pretty cool. It’s a venture of Rand Simberg’s co-blogger Sam Dinkin, who’s also married to one of my law-school classmates. Yes, it’s a small world — especially seen from space!

UPDATE: I’ve gotten a lot of emails like this one from Evan Coyne Maloney: “I’ll sign up if that hottie from the banner image will be on the flight!”

You’ll have to take that up with Sam.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Well, no you won’t, thanks to the magic of InstaPundit! Sam writes: “Tell your emailers that they can meet her if they win. She prefers to be mysterious so she can continue to personify the ubiquitous dream of mass space travel.”

A LOOK AT MEDIA BIAS in the Chicago Tribune.

IMMIGRATION AND ANGER: Over at GlennReynolds.com.

OVER AT CATO UNBOUND, William Easterly looks at why foreign aid doesn’t work.

On the other hand, here’s a report of success from East Timor, though that’s a case that involved more than aid.

I GUESS JANE HAMSHER’S MINIONS GOT TO ‘EM: “What’s with all the Chomsky-love at the Post?“

AN INTERESTING ARTICLE on the perils of competing with people who don’t have to show a profit:

There is another breed of rival lurking online for traditional media, and it is perhaps the most vexing yet: call it purpose-driven media, with a shout-out to Rick Warren, the author of “A Purpose-Driven Life,” for borrowing his catchphrase.

These are new-media ventures that leave the competition scratching their heads because they don’t really aim to compete in the first place; their creators are merely taking advantage of the economics of the online medium to do something that they feel good about. They would certainly like to cover their costs and maybe make a buck or two, but really, they’re not in it for the money. By purely commercial measures, they are illogical. If your name were, say, Rupert or Sumner, they would represent the kind of terror that might keep you up at night: death by smiley face.

Hey, someone should write a book about this phenomenon!

THE SUPREME COURT has refused to hear Padilla’s appeal. (Via John Stephenson).

YALE’S TALIBAN PROBLEM just gets worse: “A 9/11 survivor asks Yale to explain why it admitted the Taliban Man.”

IN THE MAIL: John Hasnas’ new book, Trapped: When Acting Ethically is Against the Law. Well worth reading for those interested in the area, and nicely blurbed by the likes of Richard Epstein.

Cool cover, too.

MICHAEL YOUNG: “Arab summits are typically repositories of failure. The latest one in Khartoum, Sudan this week was no exception.”

DR. SANITY looks at fear of female sexuality.