CRAIG NEWMARK DEBATES NET NEUTRALITY with Mike McCurry in the Wall Street Journal. (Free link).

And here’s an interesting interview with Craig. I can attest that he does customer-service at all hours; I was up and posting at 3:30 AM one morning (we had moved to the basement during a tornado watch) and immediately got an email from him wondering what was wrong. Nothing, I replied, just a tornado.

PROTESTS reported in Tabriz.

MICKEY KAUS on the latest Senate immigration move to make “guest workers” subject to Davis-Bacon and exempt from employment-at-will laws:

Overpaid, unfireable … guest workers, the new civil servants! Finally, farm laborers Washington can love.

Jeez.

UPDATE: Read this roundup on Republican dissatisfaction from Danny Glover, too.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader suggests, quite cogently, that Kaus is missing the poison-pill aspect of this provision: “It would seem that the easiest way to stop illegal immigration quickly would be to mandate that all illegals are subject to Davis-Bacon and exempt from employment-at-will laws, thereby, removing immediately their sole employment advantage, namely, their low labor cost.”

ANOTHER CIVIL RIGHTS SUCCESS: “A lawsuit in the District against gunmakers was dismissed yesterday by a D.C. Superior Court judge who ruled that the suit was precisely the sort of claim that a new federal law was intended to block.”

THE AP, GUANTANAMO, AND OSAMA: Ed Morrissey notes an odd omission.

WITH MEMBERS OF CONGRESS CLAIMING that they’re exempt from searches in bribery cases, it’s probably worth noting this new Zogby poll, which shows that the American public holds all its leaders — but especially Congress — in low esteem.

No doubt Congress will want to respond by putting criticism off limits, too.

UPDATE: Hastert is creating more anger from the base: “I no longer wish to be counted as a Republican. The Speaker has been a weak voice for cutting spending and for immigration reform but a loud voice when his own privilege is at stake.”

MARK GLASER HAS MORE on imprisoned Egyptian blogger Alaa:

For some time, Alaa and his wife, Manal Hassan — the pair are pictured above — have had a popular web hub called Manal and Alaa’s Bit Bucket . While it does include a blog in Arabic and English, the site has much more to it. Alaa told me last summer that the site was built to showcase their skills as open-source software and web developers. He ticked off all the features of the site beyond the blog: an aggregator of Egyptian blogs; free hosting for non-profit sites; events calendar; photo galleries; encrypted private spaces for secret online discussions; videos of violence against protesters; reviews of WiFi hotspots around Cairo.

So after Alaa’s detention on May 7, the reaction from the blogosphere and other activists around the globe was swift. They created a multi-faceted campaign to free him and bring attention to his plight in a way that fit with his tech-savvy personality. The Global Voices blog set up a special wiki , which lists all the ways people are promoting his release online and offline. Anyone can edit the wiki to add their own activity or ideas.

So far, there’s been a Flash animation , an online petition (signed by 1,100+ people so far), badges to post on websites and blogs, and a special Wikipedia entry . People have even tried a Google bomb strategy, where they link the Free Alaa blog with the word “Egypt” so that Google searches for Egypt will pull up the blog. It hasn’t worked well so far, but the idea is innovative.

As DemoBlogger points out on the Free Alaa blog: “The total cost of launching a global human rights campaign using digital tools: $0. The total time needed to launch a global human rights campaign using digital tools: 24 hours.”

Read the whole thing.

AVIAN FLU UPDATE: Possible human-to-human transmission in Indonesia. When we talked to Bill Frist about this, his advice (“make sure your will is up to date”) wasn’t very comforting.

HERE’S A ROUNDUP on bogus antiwar veteran Jesse MacBeth.

CUT THEIR PAY AND SEND THEM HOME: GOP Congress members are objecting to the FBI raid on bribery suspect Rep. William Jefferson. I’d approve of this bipartisan spirit if it weren’t just an example of the only kind of bipartisanship you can really count on from Congress — standing shoulder to shoulder in defense of insiders’ perks and against the interests of the voters.

UPDATE: Heh: “Sort of like a man who catches his cheating spouse in the act and all she can say is ‘I can’t believe you didn’t knock!'”

CATHY YOUNG isn’t scared of fellatio.

UPDATE: Related thoughts from TigerHawk.

THE DIXIE CHICKS: Learning the difference between capitalism and censorship.

DAVID GERGEN is hard to please.

MORE NEWS ON SYRIA AND THE HARIRI ASSASSINATION, from Michael Young.

LORIE BYRD is now blogging at Wizbang.

PETER WEHNER TAKES ON REVISIONIST HISTORY ON IRAQ: Glad to see it, though it’s not exactly news.

UPDATE: A related post from Neo-neocon. And this post by Evan Coyne Maloney is worth reading, too.

A LOOK AT NASA’S NEW SPACE PLANS from Tom Jones.

“CLINTONS DOGGED BY SEX FREQUENCY QUESTIONS:” I shudder to think of the google traffic that phrase will attract. But I do think that the Times might want to focus on more important subjects.

I guess that sort of thing is a downside of being a politician. The upside, of course, is that you can be called “surprisingly tech-savvy” just for owning an iPod!

SKYPE: Passing the buck over Chinese censorship.

A CALL FOR REP. JEFFERSON’S RESIGNATION over at The Daily Kos.

MORE COMPLAINTS ABOUT POLITICAL BIAS AT GOOGLE: Google would be wise to address this before they join Dell in the category of once-loved tech companies that forfeited customer trust. (Via James Joyner, who has more thoughts.)

SAUDI SCHOOL BUS UPDATE: “Two Saudi men jailed last week after being accused of boarding a school bus and riding to a New Tampa high school could be released as early as today after federal and local authorities determined the pair are in this country legally and are not a security risk.” Well, that’s a relief.

THE CARNIVAL OF LIBERTY IS UP! So is the Carnival of Homeschooling. And, of course, Grand Rounds.

UPDATE: And don’t miss the Blawg Review!

MEMBERS OF CONGRESS ARE COMPLAINING about the FBI raid on Rep. William Jefferson’s office. The separation of powers argument seems to be pretty weak to me: The actual scope of Congressional immunity under the speech and debate clause is quite narrow (narrower, oddly, than the judically-created immunities enjoyed by judges and prosecutors) and certainly doesn’t include immunity from search in a bribery case.

At any rate, members of Congress who are offended by an unannounced late-night raid on an office might profitably be asked what they think about late-night unannounced raids on private homes, which happen all the time as part of the Congressionally-mandated War on Drugs.

If anything, it ought to work the other way. I think if you searched 435 randomly selected American homes, and 435 Congressional offices, you just might find more evidence of crime in the latter. . . .

UPDATE: Roger Simon wonders what got into Newt Gingrich.

Meanwhile, here’s more on that whole culture of corruption thing.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Via Radley Balko, a whole series of blog posts about no-knock SWAT-type raids that make the search of Rep. Jefferson’s office look rather mild.

Any member of Congress objecting to the Jefferson search without having a problem with raids like these is a hypocrite.

MORE: Heh:

One can almost hear Speaker Hastert trying to defend himself: ”Look, I said something about executive branch overreaching just this morning. Ya know, I’ve signed off on some extraordinary police powers over the years, but there’s gotta be a limit to those powers. The Constitution is clear: The right of members of Congress to be secure in their offices and homes shall not be violated!”

Yeah, screw the rest of us.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK:

As many as 26.5 million veterans were placed at risk of identity theft after an intruder stole an electronic data file this month containing their names, birth dates and Social Security numbers from the home of a Department of Veterans Affairs employee, Secretary Jim Nicholson said yesterday. . . .

The theft represents the biggest unauthorized disclosure ever of Social Security data, and it could make affected veterans vulnerable to credit card fraud if the burglars realize the value of the data, one expert said.

“In terms of Social Security numbers, it’s the biggest breach,” said Evan Hendricks, publisher of the Privacy Times newsletter and author of the book “Credit Scores and Credit Reports.” “As long as you’ve got that exact Social, most of the time the credit bureaus will disclose your credit report, and that enables the thief to get credit.”

This kind of thing is why I’m not impressed with calls for a National ID. Of course, it’s also why I’m not impressed with credit bureaus.