THINGS THAT DON’T SUCK: Bought this cordless drill a while back, replacing my Ryobi that would never hold a charge. Got it out and ran it a good deal yesterday, having not charged the batteries in a couple of months, and it did great. Seems to have plenty of power, too, even though the Ryobi was a 14.4 volt and this is a 9.6.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: A big push on earmarks is underway. Here’s an editorial from the Washington Examiner:

Something new is happening today as The Examiner invites readers to help uncover which members of Congress sponsored the 1,867 secret spending earmarks worth more than $500 million in the Labor-Health and Human Services appropriation bill now before Congress.

These earmarks average more than $268,000 each. To our knowledge, The Examiner is the first-ever daily newspaper to join with readers, citizen activists from across the political spectrum and bloggers in this manner to uncover the facts behind government spending.

The Examiner — in cooperation with the Sunlight Foundation, Porkbusters.org and Citizens Against Government Waste — is making the Labor-HHS earmarks database public.

Here’s the Examiner resource page, and here’s the page from the Sunlight Foundation. And here’s more from Andy Roth and Robert Bluey.

UPDATE: Here’s more from Tim Chapman, and here’s the huge PorkBusters resource page. Dig in!

DANNY GLOVER LOOKS AT the online curse of incumbency.

A 9/11 CONNECTION to the British sky plot?

CELEBRATING DIVERSITY with Hezbollah. “Diversity? Yes, the crowd ran the gamut all the way from the genocidal to the merely anti-Semitic.” (Via Volokh).

MORE ON FAUXTOGRAPHY and other journalistic scandals, in my TCS Daily column today.

INSTAPUNDIT READERS SURE LIKE RUDY GIULIANI, judging from the poll below. I believe he’s led in pretty much all the blogospheric straw polls, but this margin is huge. I’m pretty sure that Newt is overperforming, too.

UPDATE: Brian Erst emails:

The results for your Republican presidential candidate straw poll were about what I expected. Giuliani in a landslide, followed by Gingrich.

I’ve always thought the faithful Instapundit reader was first and foremost a security voter, not a Republican, and they are definitely going to break for Giuliani. Wonks and geeks make up a big chunk of the rest, so they (like me) went for Gingrich, the geekiest wonk out there. Neither will probably survive the real Republican primary though. Giuliani is too liberal for primary voters, and Gingrich is (brilliantly) damaged goods.

That leaves the real fight – McCain/Allen/Romney. McCain can easily win the main election, and is the second-place finisher in the last Republican primaries (Repubs tend to promote the runner-up to the head of the next ticket), so he’s the prohibitive favorite. George Allen can make watching wallpaper dry seem like the mosh pit at a late-80s Pantera concert, but has a good organization. Romney is the best pure politician out there – if McCain stumbles, Romney will be turned into the Ronald Reagan of Latter-Day Saints…

We’ll see. I’m not sure that Giuliani will do as badly in the Republican primaries as the conventional wisdom suggests. And Allen’s been more interesting than he’d probably like, lately.

UPDATE: Stephen Green doesn’t like the selection: “I’d say the choices fall into three categories – unelectable, undesirable, or both.”

Various people think I should have included Condi, but I was trying to limit the field to the core.

SOME PEOPLE THOUGHT THAT THIS WEEKEND’S McCain/Lieberman – Giuliani/Romney matchup was too limited. So here are some more choices. What do you think? Coming soon, another one on Democrats.

ANNALEE NEWITZ LOOKS AT THE ALLURE OF FEMBOTS:

Feminist science-fiction writer Amy Thomson, author of robot-comes-of-age novel Virtual Girl, suggests that the fembot myth is attractive to men because it deals with “a woman you create and control.” But tech journalist Daniel Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising, argues that fictional fembots have hardly been portrayed as controllable—in fact, he claims, they’re often presented as the most dangerous robots of all, because feelings of attraction to them could leave their victims vulnerable to attack. “A sexy robot that’s aggressive could be a wolf in rubberized skin,” he says.

There’s no mention of Sgt. Eve Edison, however, making the treatment sadly incomplete.

DAVE WEIGEL: “Despite the best efforts of cable TV and magazine journalists, pollster Rasmussen finds that most Americans don’t give a fig about the Joe Lieberman-Ned Lamont Senate brawl.”

THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM: Michael Totten has more reporting from the Israeli-Lebanese border.

THE CONVERGESOUTH BLOGGER CONFERENCE will be October 15th, in Greensboro.

I TALK ABOUT NANOTECHNOLOGY, and Simon Cooper talks about Chinese theft of military secrets, on the latest Popular Mechanics podcast.

TIM BLAIR ON THE REACTION TO GUNTER GRASS’S NAZI PAST: “Leftist authors sure do love tyrants.”

Meanwhile, Gary Farber observes:

His whole life as a writer has been a lie.

About being in the Waffen SS.

Not a small thing.

Not something to be redeemed by finally coming forward. Now. In 2006. At the age of 78.

He feels guilty?

Good. But not good enough.

New spin — It was just a case of being ahead of the lefty fashion curve. He was an antisemite before antisemitism was cool!

UPDATE: David Mosier emails: “Just a hunch but I’ll bet the Soviet Union knew about Grass’s Nazi past since 1945, and threatened to reveal it if he took them on in his writing. Just like they knew about Waldheim.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg thinks that Grass deserves a pass compared to some other figures of the left:

Grass was just a teenager when he joined Hitler’s killing machine. Shaw, Heidegger and a shocking number of the Western left’s intellectual heroes were grown ups when they became enamored with Hitler. Gertrude Stein — a Jew! — led an effort to award Hitler the Nobel Peace Prize in 1938.

Judging by some more recent Peace Prize awardees, I’d say he was a suitable candidate.

A VIDEO TRIBUTE TO THE ANTIWAR MOVEMENT, at Hot Air.

DESPERATELY smearing Susan.

IN THE MAIL: Another Harry Turtledove book! The guy’s a writing machine! Unlike Fort Pillow, which was a straight historical novel, this one’s alt-history, with the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt taking place in Richmond, and a cameo appearance by Fidel Castro as an anti-Confederate guerrilla.

ABC NEWS: “Federal prosecutors in Miami were prepared to indict Raul Castro as the head of a major cocaine smuggling conspiracy in 1993, but the Clinton Administration Justice Department overruled them.”

A MESSAGE TO THE BELGIAN GOVERNMENT on its human-rights violations.

MORE ON THE EDUCATION GENDER GAP:

While black, Hispanic and low-income children again lagged far behind others on statewide mastery test scores, another group of students also remained mired in a chronic – though often less noticed – achievement gap.

Boys continued to trail girls by substantial margins in reading and writing on the annual Connecticut Mastery Test. The pattern has persisted since Connecticut first started keeping track of scores by gender in 2000, and is consistent with longstanding patterns on national tests.

Read the whole thing.

THE BELMONT CLUB’S RICHARD FERNANDEZ interviews Major General William McCoy, Commanding General of the Corps of Engineers, Iraq, on reconstruction efforts, over at PoliticsCentral.

RAND SIMBERG on the Reuters scandal and journalistic dishonesty:

First, it wasn’t the first time that such fakery has occurred in the so-called mainstream media, and the phenomenon doesn’t seem to be random, as it might be if it were a simple mistake, or breakdown in the vetting process. The fabricated images always seem to have the effect, intended or otherwise, of propagandizing against the West (in this case, the state of Israel, in the other example, President Bush).

The second thing that was disturbing is that, also like the previous cases, it took bloggers to point out what should have been an obvious tampering with the photo. Are major media editors really that incompetent (which gets back, of course, to disturbing concern Numero Uno)? This last isn’t an unreasonable question, given that this is the news agency that famously said that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”

While Reuters deserves credit for immediately announcing to their distributors that the photo was questionable, and cutting off any further contributions from the (Arab) free-lance photographer who provided it, there is, actually, a third disturbing thing about it — what it presages for the future.

Read the whole thing.

A LOOK AT campus diversity.

“THE NATION MAY BE TIRED, but history doesn’t care.”

UPDATE: Bush critic Bill Quick writes: “This is one of the most important articles to appear to date in the entire span of the war on terror.”

He then posts a response. It’s worth reading, especially if you work at the White House.