YESTERDAY’S REAL FOOD / CRUNCHY CONS PODCAST produced a lot of email, including one from Dave Johnston of The Crisper, who says that he lost 51 pounds by switching to a “real food” diet. And the before-and-after pictures are pretty impressive.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: More on pork from the D.C. Examiner:

This tale of two small tech companies in Alexandria perfectly illustrates how damaging the practice of earmarking — anonymously adding spending to appropriations bills without public hearings, open debate or peer review — has become. And not only for taxpayers who foot the bill.

Vibration and Sound Solutions Ltd. received millions for its “Project M” magnetic levitation program, thanks to earmarks submitted by Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va., and Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif. The tax dollars kept coming even though the Navy decided five years ago it wasn’t interested in VSSL’s magnetic levitation program.

When federal funds finally dried up earlier this year, Moran campaign contributor and company President Robert Conkling shuttered his Royal Street facility. At that point, according to Department of Defense officials, VSSL had received at least $30 million from the firm’s lone “customer” even though that customer insisted for years it wasn’t interested in the magnetic levitation program.

Moran and Hunter were far from alone in using defense spending for questionable purposes. There were 2,847 earmarks totaling $9.4 billion submitted by members of Congress in the fiscal ’06 defense budget. Not a dime of that $9.4 billion was requested by President Bush or Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.

You could do a lot with 9.4 billion dollars.

Meanwhile, Bill Frist responds to an InstaPundit post on pork from yesterday. “Many in the blogosphere – left and right – have rallied to support this crucial legislation, which is fitting, for no group better knows the power of technologically empowered grassroots activism. And, for reasons of policy and politics, many bloggers are rightly outraged that S. 2590 was shot down when I attempted to bring it up for a vote prior to the August recess.”

But he doesn’t out the Senator behind the “secret hold” on the earmark reform legislation. I suppose that’s too much to expect, but it’s not too much to hope for. . . .

MICHAEL TOTTEN looks at Israel’s “Peace Now” under fire.

PREMIUM WATTS ONLY: Popular Mechanics has a driver’s report on the Tesla electric roadster. “You squirt through traffic holes without the hesitation—it’s absolutely always in meat of the powerband. And all you hear from the powertrain is a hushed turbine-like wail from behind your head.” I’d like one.

ANN ALTHOUSE IN The New York Times:

As long as we’re appreciating irony, let’s consider the irony of emphasizing the importance of holding one branch of the federal government, the executive, to the strict limits of the rule of law while sitting in another branch of the federal government, the judiciary, and blithely ignoring your own obligations.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Judicial Watch is claiming a conflict of interest.

And Ann thinks that some people are missing the point.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Orin Kerr isn’t very impressed with Judicial Watch’s complaints: “I don’t think Judge Taylor wrote a good opinion, but I think it’s very far-fetched and rather insulting to her to suggest that her opinion was influenced by some kind of actual conflict of interest.”

I suspect that’s right, though it’s probably true that if this case involved a conservative judge and the NRA we’d be hearing more about it.

A LOOK AT THE MINDSET OF THIS YEAR’S FRESHMAN CLASS:

1. The Soviet Union has never existed and therefore is about as scary as the student union.
2. They have known only two presidents.
3. For most of their lives, major U.S. airlines have been bankrupt.
4. Manuel Noriega has always been in jail in the U.S.
5. They have grown up getting lost in “big boxes”.
6. There has always been only one Germany.
7. They have never heard anyone actually “ring it up” on a cash register.

Lots more, including my favorite: “Ringo Starr has always been clean and sober.” He’s the Thomas the Tank Engine guy, right? But wasn’t he in in some band, once, too?

MICKEY KAUS: “Whose judgment do you trust more: sweet unionized Iowa teachers or cynical unionized Vegas gambling workers? Somehow I don’t think the Vegas gambling workers would have picked out John Kerry as ‘electable!'”

IRAN’S DIPLOMATIC STRATEGY, EXPLAINED.

AMIT VARMA WRITES on transforming India’s mental landscape.

A LOOK AT keeping silent rather than helping Bush.

DAVID BERNSTEIN on the decline of Amnesty International.

UPDATE: Ed Driscoll reminds me that Steven Den Beste was on top of this phenomenon three years ago.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS ON GUNTER GRASS’S SS PAST:

“Let those who want to judge, pass judgment,” Grass said last week in a typically sententious utterance. Very well, then, mein lieber Herr. The first judgment is that you kept quiet about your past until you could win the Nobel Prize for literature. The second judgment is that you are not as important to German or to literary history as you think you are. The third judgment is that you will be remembered neither as a war criminal nor as an anti-Nazi hero, but more as a bit of a bloody fool.

Ouch.

RICHARD COHEN ON THE MIDEAST: “This inability of Europe to get its act together is what suggests 1938. . . . Hezbollah’s avowed aim is to eradicate Israel. Listen to what it says. Pay attention. It will renew its attacks the first chance it gets. This is why it exists.”

PLAME UPDATE: Richard Armitage’s hot seat is getting hotter.

IRAQPUNDIT SAYS HEZBOLLAH DIDN’T WIN. Aziz Poonawalla says Israel didn’t lose.

A LOOK AT BLOGS and conversational marketing. (Via PJM).

ERIC SCHEIE HAS SOME THOUGHTS in response to the animal-rights terrorism item I posted earlier:

I think that the tactic of threatening children (which I’ve posted about infra), while nothing new to animal rights activists, works as a “twofer.” That’s because it simultaneously accomplishes both of the following:

1. It intimidates the intended audience (all animal researchers, and especially other researchers who might so much as think about doing animal research); and

2. It advances the nihilistic ideology that there is no moral distinction between humans and animals.

The latter fires up the troops, and frightens everyone else.

These observations are not new for me, and I’m sure others have made them too. But the reason I decided to write this post was that the other day I had the occasion to talk to a genetics researcher who works in the United States but who comes from another country, and closely follows what goes on in his field worldwide. He told me that the animal research work is constantly, relentlessly, being shifted to China. (You know… “Outsourcing.”)

In an amazing coincidence, the outsourcing of animal research to China is also a “twofer”:

1. In China, the concept of animal rights is a laugh (even more of a laugh than human rights, which is also a laugh). This means animal research facilities are not subject to policing or inspections as they are in the West.

2. Chinese researchers are meticulous and hard-working, and cost a fraction of their American counterparts.

So, as a result of the fascistic activist tactics, animal rights research is farmed out to a basically fascist country, where animals suffer more, and where the research can be conducted inexpensively without any real ethical limitations.

Sounds likely to me.

UPDATE: Jim Bennett emails:

Well, in its own way China also upholds the principle that there is no ethical difference between human and animals (sorry, make that “non-human animals”). Animals have no rights there, and neither do humans.

It’s all making sense, now.

FINALLY, A FATWA I CAN GET BEHIND: “Death to CAPS LOCK.”

MACACAGATE UPDATE: “Burned by a blog-induced firestorm over an an off-hand comment at a campaign rally, Sen. George Allen’s campaign is seeking a conservative blog maven who can blunt future attacks and help rally conservatives in the state and elsewhere behind Allen’s campaign.” Better late than never, I guess, but . . . .

BRENDAN LOY LOOKS AT hurricane disaster scenarios that make Katrina look mild.

He’s right to warn of these. On the other hand, as I’ve noted before, the media’s tendency to hype every hurricane mercilessly means that warnings about really dangerous ones are more likely to be ignored. I think that was one reason why Katrina warnings got less attention than they deserved.

UPDATE: On further reflection, I want to quote this bit from Brendan’s post: “He is mystified by a study that found 60 percent of people in hurricane-prone U.S. coastal areas have no hurricane plan — which to disaster managers means up to a week’s worth of food and water squirreled away, a kit with flashlights and other gear, and an established evacuation route to higher ground.”

People, I don’t care where you live, you should have a week’s food and water, some other disaster supplies, and a plan for where to go if you have to leave your home. More on that here.

MY ARMY OF DAVIDS VIEWS COME IN FOR SOME CRITICISM at Government Executive magazine, which seems to view me as insufficiently friendly to big government. On the other hand, the author also thinks I work at the University of Texas, so I don’t feel terribly stung by his criticism.

UPDATE: Reader Bill O’Neill found something else to object to:

Even more characteristic of government bureaucrats than the (now corrected) error in your university is the following sentence from the review you linked:

“I was intrigued by the notion of who might want to beat big government — usually only tax cheats and other criminals are interested in that kind of racket.”

Do you think this pompous bozo believes he works for us, the taxpayers?

Yes, quite a few people found that sentence both revealing and objectionable. (Though I should note that Govt. Executive is published for government employees, but not by government employees). But Shoop did send me a non-pompous email on the error: “Jeez, that was a dumb mistake. My apologies. I’ll correct it.”

Quick correction is characteristic of the blogosphere and the Army of Davids, so maybe there’s hope for him yet.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Rand Simberg comments on the review, and observes: “It’s useful to note that when people criticize big government (at this website, the target is often NASA), it’s not (necessarily) criticism of the people who work for the big government. People, good people, respond to the situation in which they find themselves, and they also respond to the incentives inherent in that system.”

I’ve also noticed that some government people — and some journalists — respond to criticism of their employer or profession as if it were criticism directed at them, personally.

A MAJOR TAX DECISION from the D.C. Circuit, involving the reach of the Sixteenth Amendment. TaxProf has the scoop.

HAM ON PORK: It’s a PorkBusters videocast from Mary Katharine Ham.

I think some folks in Congress were hoping that this issue would just kind of evaporate over the summer. Sorry, guys.

MORE ON THE WAR, from Michael Barone. And here are some related thoughts from Arnold Kling. “I think that the popular instinct is that the elites so far have not gotten it right on security and Islamic militancy. And in that regard, the popular instinct is right.”