NASA WILL BE BROADCASTING LIVE FROM SPACE IN HDTV at 11:30 Eastern today. It’ll be on the Discovery HD channel.

And yes, I’ll be watching it (I think I get Discovery HD) on the TV I mentioned earlier — the reader advice was mostly positive, and while the inevitable wait until the new technology appears in a few months advice was persuasive, it always is and you have to buy something sometime. I’m very happy with the picture, and as several readers point out, Consumer Reports liked the JVC line a lot, too. I didn’t buy it off Amazon, but from the local H.H. Gregg outlet, which wanted a lot more but which I persuaded to match the Amazon price.

ED CONE LOOKS AT REGIME CHANGE IN CONGRESS and invokes Pete Townshend.

Meanwhile, Betsy’s Page looks at Murtha’s candidacy for Majority Leader and thinks Pelosi has gotten herself in a box:

And don’t forget that this is one guy who was all against any plans to limit earmarks. Is he really the guy that the Democrats want as their poster child for their efforts to supposedly remake the House?

It will be interesting to see if Pelosi is going to go to the mattresses to get her guy elected Majority Leader. She has made her support so public that it will be taken as a defeat for her if Steny Hoyer defeats Murtha. But a Murtha victory will immediately taint the new Democratic majority with a very strong whiff of corruption plus being tied to a guy who is a past master of pork and earmarks. Is that their new image for disposing of the “culture of corruption?”

Republicans, on the other hand, should be happy with Murtha as the face of the “New” Democratic majority in Congress.

UPDATE: The New Republic is criticizing Pelosi’s effort to put the impeached-for-corruption Alcee Hastings in as Chair of the Intelligence Committee:

Ordinarily, few people would take Hastings seriously for such an important job. In 1981, Hastings was a federal judge in Miami. He was accused of conspiring with a friend to take a $150,000 bribe in exchange for issuing light sentences to a pair of mobsters. A Miami jury acquitted Hastings (while convicting the friend), but three different federal judicial panels later referred him to Congress for impeachment. “Judge Hastings attempted to corruptly use his office for personal gain. Such conduct cannot be excused or condoned even after Judge Hastings has been acquitted of the criminal charge,” concluded one panel, composed of five circuit court judges. . . .

There’s ample reason to think that Americans cast a negative vote last week–not so much for Democrats as against Republicans. Over the next two years, voters will be watching to see whether Democrats are up to the responsibility of governing, and doing so with the national interest in mind. If Nancy Pelosi bases her decision about such a critical position on a combination of personal feuding and identity politics, she won’t just do Republicans a favor by giving them a readymade bogeyman to attack. She will have shown voters that she’s unable to push aside petty institutional politics in the name of the national interest.

Read the whole thing. So far I’d say the Dems are off to a weak start.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Tom Bevan has more on Murtha’s problems:

What irony. One of the left’s main knocks on President Bush over the years is that he’s been too blinded by loyalty and that his administration has suffered from cronyism. Yet here you have the new Speaker of the House, whose drapes haven’t even been measured or hung yet, pulling out all the stops to install an ethically-challenged pal for Majority Leader out of blind loyalty and passing over another perfectly competent member (Jane Harman) out of pure pique to turn over the Chairmanship of the Intelligence Committee to a man who was impeached for taking bribes. Not the most auspicious of beginnings, I’d say.

Neither the GOP nor the Democrats seems to have taken the lesson of the ’06 elections to heart.

THOUGHTS ON DIVERSITY AND ACADEMIC VALUES: “Schmidt’s point is that he feels disrespected by the letter, because he voted for the amendment and he’s getting the message that his university thinks people like him are bad: Why is there no concern about his feelings? Isn’t part of caring about diversity making people who believe different things feel welcome in the university environment?”

LEARNED NOTHING AND FORGOTTEN NOTHING? Trent Lott wants back in the Senate leadership. Capt. Ed isn’t excited about this: “My opposition comes from Lott’s attitude towards pork, and especially his attitude about the people who oppose pork spending.”

Given the Democrats’ anti-pork positioning of late — and the importance of issues like pork and corruption, which sat at the top of the exit poll issues list, to voters — it seems to me that picking Lott would be a big mistake for the GOP if they want to recover in 2008. As Ed puts it:

Republicans need to show that they have learned a lesson from their midterm drubbing. They lost their majorities because voters perceived that they had lost touch with the electorate on policy as well as attitude. We sent Republicans to clean up Congress, not to clean up for themselves in porkfests that rival anything that came before them. Trent Lott represents the worst of that class, and the mere idea that he remains in consideration for a leadership position after his commentary this year proves that the GOP hasn’t listened hard enough.

Indeed.

RON ROSENBAUM: “A Second Holocaust is now virtually Iranian state policy.”

IS DEMOCRACY LIKE SEX? My TCS Daily column is up.

MICKEY KAUS: “Murtha claims he’s the victim of a ‘swift-boating attack’ when really it’s just the MSM playing post-election catch up . . . . Of course, more Murtha thrashes around like a frantic whale, the more attention he attracts–and the more he puts Pelosi’s rep on the line, and the more he makes her pull out all stops to help him.”

Meanwhile, here’s more on Murtha and the “culture of corruption.”

AUDIO, TRANSCRIPTS, AND MORE: Over at TTLB’s questions for the Republican leadership page.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Abramoff testifies.

OUCH: “The Harriet Miers of RNC Chairs.”

MEGAN MCARDLE ASKS: “What would nationalised health care look like here?“

UPDATE: More on government and health care here.

IS DAILYKOS pro-Chevron?

Personally, I’ve always preferred the old Pure Oil Company, though since they were bought by Unocal, which was bought by Chevron, I guess there’s no real difference.

THINKING ABOUT CARBON: “You know the energy picture has changed when some of the world’s biggest companies are making news by joining forces on nuclear energy—a sector that’s been, well, radioactive in the United States for a generation.”

A MOVE FOR TRANSPARENCY IN HIGHER EDUCATION?

Universities don’t like this, but it’s hard to (1) tell everyone how important higher education is to America; (2) take lots of government money while providing it; (3) support regulation of every other industry; and (4) argue for laissez faire in your own.

JIM GERAGHTY ON EVENTS IN TURKEY: “In my current neck of the woods, the secular vs. Islamist fight is starting to heat up a bit, with a bunch of flashpoints coming up in the near future. Bulent Ecevit died recently, a four-time Turkish prime minister. (There probably aren’t many people who can say they have led their country four separate times.) While he made plenty of controversial decisions, he was and is remembered as a staunch secularist. His funeral turned into a rerun of an event earlier this year, when the funeral of a judge slain by an Islamist turned into a massive, and more than a bit angry rally against the current political leadership and Islamist elements in the country. What was different was that this time, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the current prime minister showed up for the memorial service and got booed soundly.”

He continues: “A lot of EU members are about ready to give Turkey the finger; the Turks are about ready to give it right back, with the percentage of Turks wishing to join the EU dropping into the thirties. How does this effect Americans? Well, if the Turks give up on the EU and grow disgruntled with ‘the West’ as represented by Europe, where do they turn to next? Iran, Russia, and China are all eager to build ties to a potential new ally.”

I’m still unhappy with how the Turks treated us in 2003, but I think the Bush Administration should be making nice to Turkey. Maybe we could cut a favorable trade deal with them that would be a consolation prize for not getting in to the EU? We certainly don’t want them drifting off in an Islamist direction.

UPDATE: Emailing from Istanbul, Claire Berlinski writes:

A favorable trade deal is always a nice thing, but if we really want to make nice with Turkey — and I completely agree that we should, for the reasons you mention — then we will have to offer them what they really want, which is PKK heads in a box. The KDP and PUK provide refuge for the PKK in Iraq, which they use to attack Turkey. The Turks want us to go after the PKK directly, and failing that, to let them do it — to supply them with intelligence so that they can invade northern Iraq and clean out the PKK pockets. We’re of course reluctant to go after the PKK (or whatever they’re calling themselves these days) for fear of destabilizing the one part of Iraq that seems to be a success, but from the Turks’ point of view, we’ve just decided to sell them out. I agree, we have; it’s analogous to European states that refuse to support Israel’s counter-terrorism actions in Lebanon and Gaza on the grounds that they’re “destabilizing to the region.” Well yes, they are, but what are you supposed to do if you’re being attacked? If we were the victims of regular PKK terrorist attacks of the kind Turkey has suffered, we’d do to the PKK what we did to the Taliban. If we’re at all serious about waging war on terrorism generally, and not just on terrorists who target Americans, we would take the Turks’ request for help seriously. That would go a long way toward restoring the US-Turkey relationship, and it would also be the right thing to do. (I have a certain sensitivity to the issue: More than once I’ve opened the news to read that the PKK tried to blow up a restaurant or neighborhood I was in only a few days before.)

I love the Kurds, but the PKK are bad people.

DAVID WEIGEL looks at complaints of election fraud and dirty campaigning and says there’s no there, there.

MICHAEL BARONE looks at the post-election political balance.

VIA KESHER TALK, a reference to what looks like an interesting book: Nonie Darwish’s Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel, and the War on Terror. From the book description, Darwish seems to be one of those outspoken Muslim women who seem to be springing up these days. We need more of them, and Islam really needs more of them.

THOUGHTS ON engineering better human bodies. I could use one of those about now.

BIAS AT THE BBC:

The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, has accused the BBC of bias against Christianity and says the broadcaster fears a terrorist backlash if it is critical of Islam.

The archbishop, the second most senior figure in the Church of England’s hierarchy, said Christians took “more knocks” than other faiths at the hands of the BBC.

“They can do to us what they dare not do to the Muslims,” he said. “We are fair game because they can get away with it. We don’t go down there and say, ‘We are going to bomb your place.’ That is not in our nature.”

The Ugandan-born archbishop nevertheless said Christians must be more forceful in promoting their beliefs.

The BBC, through its — now admitted — biases on this subject is merely encouraging other people who don’t like its coverage to become violent. That is deeply unwise, as well as unfair. (Via Biased-BBC).

SOME THOUGHTS ON GOING HOME, from Neo-Neocon.

A LOOK AT MULTICULTURALISM AND THE FOSTERING OF DEPENDENCY IN BRITAIN: It reminds me of the line from The Rainmakers — “They’ll turn us all into beggars ’cause they’re easier to please.”

That song (Government Cheese) isn’t available online. But my one of my favorite Rainmakers songs — Let My People Go-Go — can be heard here. I’d rather that politics comported with that vision than with the rather gloomier, and more accurate, one in Government Cheese. But at least the music’s good! And there’s a video for Downstream. Check out the Harry Truman line.

TERRY HEATON’S BLOG has a new URL. And he reports this horrifying tale of greed at Hilton:

I just got back from a series of meetings in a conference room at a Hilton hotel here in Dallas, during which the hotel wanted us to pay for wireless internet access on a per-user basis. Here’s the scenario:

There were 11 of us in a small conference room with a table that seated 12. Naturally, we all wanted access to the net, but the charge for that was $175 per person! That’s $1,925 for internet access for the group. We (I) pitched a fit, and they agreed to cut it significantly, but it was still far more than what we were willing to pay.

Access in a room at the hotel is $12, but $175 for the same access in one of the conference rooms. “It’s standard in the industry,” I was told by the frightened girl I confronted in Conference Services (this challenges the meaning of that word). Can anybody say rip-off?

I think a lot of people can.

UPDATE: Whenever I post criticisms like the above, I get email like this:

I’m surprised to see you use the term greed to describe Hilton’s paractice of charging $175 for wireless internet accesss.

What do you suggest, that the government regulate it? The wirless is Hilton’s property and they have the right to charge whatever they want. If the customer doesn’t want to pay it, they should go somewhere else where it’s cheaper, which I suspect they will do next time.

What Hilton did was not greed. It was bad business practice, for which Hilton will end up paying.

It was a bad business practice motivated by greed. And now a lot more people know about it, and can take their business elsewhere without facing the problems Terry describes. And did I call for government regulation? No. If it helps you, think of criticism of stupid business practices as my InstaPundit business practice, which by the logic above puts my posts beyond any criticism, apparently. . . .

Meanwhile, reader Fred Boness emails:

I’ve heard that same “industry standard” line. Where I come from – manufacturing – there are true industry standards and they are written out in excruciating detail. What these service/support people mean by industry standard is no more than “the other kids are doing it.”

If it wasn’t so heavy, I’d carry a copy of Machinery’s Handbook or the National Electrical Code just so I could drop four pounds of book on their desk and say in my best Paul Hogan, “You think that’s an industry standard? THIS is an industry standard.”

Heh.

ALTHOUSE ON INTERNET ADDICTION: “Uh-oh, I’m sensing convoluted recovery-movement styles of deploying power. I’m siding with the guy who says you can’t be addicted to an environment.”

MICHAEL KINSLEY WONDERS WHO ELECTED THE BAKER COMMISSION:

If we had wanted our country to be run by James Baker, we had our chance. He was interested in running for president in 1996 but discovered that his interest in a James Baker presidency was not widely shared. . . . People like Baker always favor a bipartisan consensus.

They don’t really believe in politics, which is to say they don’t really believe in democracy.

In this, “people like Baker” make up a large part of the political/journalistic class.

UPDATE: Greg Djerejian takes a more positive view of the Baker Commission: “A huge challenge, to be sure, but the good news is that the last best hope for Iraq might well involve a mixture of policy positions some of which are popular with Democrats and others with Republicans.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Related thoughts from Jon Henke, who thinks that Nancy Pelosi might be onto something by saying Iraq isn’t a war: “If it were a war, we could win it by killing people and blowing stuff up. While security problems necessarily involve the occasional application of force, the dominant difficulties in Iraq simply aren’t force-on-force problems. The remaining problems are sociopolitical. No amount of firepower is going to resolve the intractable conflicts of interest between the Shiites and the Sunnis, or between various subgroups. No US troop level will convince the rival Iraqi factions that pluralism is better than asserting their own interests. They’ll either find it in their interest to moderate. . .or they won’t.”

I think that’s right — as I’ve said before, it’s a political rather than a military issue, which is why I’ve been unpersuaded by the more-troops argument. We’d prefer for Iraq to be a military problem rather than a political/diplomatic one because . . . well, because we have a lot better military than we have politicians or diplomats. Though I have to admit that the Sunnis haven’t been as smart about things as I’d thought they would be, either.

MORE: Various readers call foul, noting that Greg Djerejian’s father is the director of the Baker Institute. I thought everybody knew that.