THE POLITICS OF THE WAR: Bill Stuntz, writing in the Weekly Standard, says that voter dissatisfaction with the war stems as much from a sense that Bush isn’t fighting hard enough as from a sense that it’s going badly: “Voters may indeed want America either to win or get out of Iraq. But I bet they’d prefer winning to getting out. The real problem is that we aren’t doing either.” Michael Barone, however, sees some spine-stiffening among the electorate.

Meanwhile, Mickey Kaus looks at reports from Iraq and comments: “One wonders if the Washington players are now so locked into the hell-in-a-handbasket Iraq story line–in large part because the polls support it–that they are incapable of grokking a promising trend in the news.”

CATHY SEIPP looks at Barbara Ehrenreich.

MARY KATHARINE HAM authors a memo to the press: “Why we don’t believe you.” Various bogus-journalism incidents are invoked.

Related post here. But who could believe that Reuters would fake a photo?

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: The “Secret Senator” story got addressed by Brit Hume on Fox News today.

You can see the video at Hot Air.

Meanwhile, TPM Muckraker reports that the number of Senators denying that they’re behind the “secret hold” has risen to 58.

The circle continues to close! Some readers wonder what happens if the secret-hold Senator just lies about it? Well, if we get to 100 denials, it’s going to be pretty embarrassing for the Senate, which has already had about all the embarrassment it should want in an election year. But I don’t think that will happen.

UPDATE: Tom Maguire has more.

MARY KATHARINE HAM has the latest on the Greg Mitchell story.

STILL MORE DISASTER PREPAREDNESS: A somewhat snarky post over at KnoxViews gradually turned into a fairly useful discussion of disaster preparedness for people who are poor, sick, or disabled. (Bizgrrl’s actually very nice; she was just a bit overwrought.)

Here’s a blog post on that very topic, “disaster preparedness $5 at a time.” Anybody interested should join the conversation with their own suggestions.

WHEN THE LEVEE BROKE: Paul at Wizbang says that it was bound to go soon.

MY EARLIER POST linking to Stanley Kurtz’s “Fallout Shelter Future” article generated a lot of emails like this one from reader James Ivers:

Dean Ing, in the 1970s published a series of articles called “Gimme Shelter” in a series of paperbacks edited by Jerry Pournelle in which he listed a largish number of things an individual could do independently to survive attacks by what we now call WMD. I think I possibly still have copies of many of them.

He lists simple things like having a bicycle generator and a bike to charge up low-power radios and such, and how to radiation-proof (at least a little usefully) your basement for the 3-4 days of maximum danger from fallout, etc. How to use rolls of toilet paper and other stuff to build a servicable air filter quickly.

Anyhow, it looks like someone should look into updating this sort of stuff. Many people I knew at the time were convinced that in case of nuclear attack we’d all die. Ing said, “not so,” and explained how those even a little distance from the blast effects could increase their chances of survival. Same for CBW attacks.

I think we’re a long way (er, well, at least a medium way) from needing to prepare in Cold War fashion. But I remember the Dean Ing articles, and I believe they’re collected in Pulling Through, which is still available.

Something that we did in the 1950s and 1960s that would be worth redoing now, though, is stocking public buildings (as the designated “fallout shelters” were) with water, food, and emergency supplies, which would be useful against all sorts of disasters, natural or manmade. As we learned in Katrina, evacuations don’t get everyone out, and the people who remain are often those least able to take care of themselves or prepare for emergencies.

UPDATE: Reader John Lynch emails:

The king of the DIY nuclear survival books is Cresson Kearny’s Nuclear War Survival Skills. On Amazon, but NOT copyrighted (intentionally) and available for download legally. For obvious reasons, I’d rather have a bound copy around than one on my hard- drive.

The book is full of exact instructions on how to build a fallout shelter, how to store food, how to build your own geiger counter from a coffee can ( really ) and it has all been tested by the Oak Ridge lab. They even had some families test it out. Very readable and very useful.

Yes, I believe Kearny’s work was the basis for Dean Ing’s articles, but I’d forgotten this book if I ever knew about it. I’m not sure that this stuff is really called for, though I suspect that most of what passed for even basic nuclear-survival knowledge in the Cold War has been forgotten by nearly everyone. A basic public-education effort on duck-and-cover lines would do some good at relatively low cost.

ALLAH says that the NYT photo being questioned on Drudge isn’t photoshopped.

MAKING SADDAM watch the South Park movie.

Is that cruel and unusual punishment? No. Maybe if it were Gigli.

TPM MUCKRAKER has joined in the hunt for the missing Senator behind the secret hold on earmark reform legislation.

UPDATE: Fifty Senators are accounted for. The circle is closing: The anonymous Senator had better come clean!

CALIFORNIA KABUKI:

On August 16th, the California Senate became the first state legislative body in America to vote to turn over redistricting powers to an independent agency. Although it was hailed by hopeful reform advocates, it was an illusion. It was all part of a kabuki play launched last year when the Democratic leaders of California’s legislature promised to do redistricting reform “the right way” … if only voters went along with them in defeating Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s redistricting reform initiative, which they did. . . .

Meanwhile, after this extraordinarily laughable episode, with the press clearly not buying the explanations of Democratic legislative leaders, it’s obvious that only public pressure and the intervention of the governor will get the entrenched political class to honor its promises. What else is new?

Didn’t Kaus predict exactly this?

A FALLOUT-SHELTER FUTURE?

Better dust these off.

TERROR TV: A look at Al Manar television, over at Hot Air.

DEAN ESMAY ON THE SENATE’S SECRET HOLD: “It’s sort of telling that the government can’t keep its mouth shut about secret terrorist wiretaps and secret terrorist financial tracking programs, but somehow this information manages to stay under wraps despite public pressure.”

UPDATE: Er, Dave Price, not Dean Esmay. The dreaded co-blogger confusion strikes again!

MORE FAKE NEWS.

“DUMB ECONOMIC POPULISM:” Sebastian Mallaby writes: “By beating up Wal-Mart and forcing it to focus on public relations rather than opening new stores, Democrats are harming the poor Americans they claim to speak for.”

A DIGITAL CAMERA customer satisfaction survey, from J.D. Power. (Thanks to reader Paul Engel for the link).

MICHAEL TOTTEN REPORTS on Israel’s other rocket war, with lots of photos.

AMERICA: More like Sweden than you thought!

PRAISE for Tom Lantos.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: The “secret hold” story has provided an irresistible news hook.

It’s a sign of just how hot an issue pork-barrel spending has become that the biggest game in political Washington this summer is trying to smoke out the senator who is blocking a bill to create a searchable database of federal contracts and grants.

The bill has the support of the Bush administration and activists on widely divergent sides of the political spectrum. It also passed a Senate committee without any objections, so the unknown senator is annoying many people. . . .

Now Porkbusters.org, a Web site dedicated to exposing wasteful government spending, is conducting a public campaign to smoke out the obstructor or obstructors, while blogs on both sides of the political spectrum have weighed in, demanding action on the bill. Mr. Frist has also vowed to get into the act, promising to try to pass the bill again when Congress returns from its break next month.

“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,” Mr. Frist wrote in an entry last week on the blog of Volpac, his political action committee.

Thanks, anonymous Senator!

UPDATE: More here:

The hunt for the senator is turning into a classic political “whodunit,” said Brian Darling, director of senate relations for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative leaning think tank based in Washington.

It could be anyone — Democrat or Republican — Darling said. To place a hold, senators merely have to inform their leader that they don’t want the legislation to move forward, he said.

It remains unclear if the senator responsible will be able to withstand the pressure from the broad array of groups and senators supporting the bill.

Why would a senator be against a database that makes it easy to track what companies are awarded grants, procurement contracts, loans, insurance and financial assistance?

“Somebody has something to hide,” said Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a new Washington-based nonprofit devoted to helping the public understand Congress through the Internet.

Gee do you think? And still more here:

The same Senate rules prohibit those party leaders from disclosing which of them did this dirty deed, and at which senator’s behest. It’s treated like classified information.

It’s troubling enough that Congress functions like this. All the worse is that this is such an important bill that serves the pubic interest. That some would stoop to such depths in opposition to government transparency can only suggests that the awarding of the government contracts and grants the database would track is even more corrupt than anyone had suspected.

It does.

ROD LIDDLE in the (London) Times:

Quick, somebody buy a wreath. Last week marked the passing of multiculturalism as official government doctrine. No longer will opponents of this corrosive and divisive creed be silenced simply by the massed Pavlovian ovine accusation: “Racist!” Better still, the very people who foisted multiculturalism upon the country are the ones who have decided that it has now outlived its usefulness — that is, the political left. It is amazing how a few by-election shocks and some madmen with explosive backpacks can concentrate the mind. . . . This is how far we have come in the past year or so. When an ICM poll of Britain’s Muslims in February this year revealed that some 40% (that is, about 800,000 people) wished to see Islamic law introduced in parts of Britain, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality responded by saying that they should therefore pack their bags and clear off. Sir Trevor Phillips’s exact words were these: ‘If you want to have laws decided in another way, you have to live somewhere else.’

I think we’ll see more of that.

“THANK YOU, WAL-MART!” Wait, I thought that when Wal-Mart forced Coke to make its product healthier that was a bad thing, and a sign of its evil monopsony power . . . .