AN ARMY OF DAVIDS REVIEW from Rand Simberg: “For only seventeen bucks plus shipping, as a valuable glimpse of the future, it’s a bargain. But it could be an even better deal–Amazon should bundle it with a slingshot.”

And yes, as one of his commenters suggests, Rand and I should probably do a whole book on space.

Meanwhile, reader Ryan Mass emails:

I just pre-ordered your book in appreciation for your good work. To wit:

1) Your book recommendations are excellent. Because of you I have read The Singularity is Near and Self-Made Man, and regularly read Day by Day. Each is very well-written, thought provoking, and enjoyable.

2) I enjoy your podcasts. They’re great to listen to while I work out at home.

3) Of course the blog and all its links are invaluable. I look forward to reading what the book has to say.

Hey, buy it because it’s the right height to prop up your coffee table — I’m an author, we’re not choosy about the reasons . . . .

But seriously, thanks for all the support on the book. I really appreciate it. I tried to make it more than a Maureen Dowd stapler-job (though there were moments when I appreciated the virtues of that approach. . .) and I hope that people like it.

SPRUIELL ON DURBIN: “The ‘who do you work for’ defense isn’t going to work anymore, but my guess is that politicians will be using it more often as bloggers start doing original reporting and covering live events. Why? Because bloggers often come from the ranks of working professionals — in this case, a lawyer — and will be drawn to covering areas where they can legitimately claim some expertise. Professional journalists are asked to jump from issue to issue, often with little time to study in between. When I covered the WTO ministerial in Hong Kong, I noticed that the most challenging questions came from writers for trade publications who knew the issues cold. Bloggers combine that expertise with a passion for politics, and that can lead to some very challenging questions for politicians.”

BRENDAN LOY is following up on the Julian Bond story.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: John Fund looks at Ted Stevens, Prince of Pork:

Everyone seems to agree that Congress needs to clean up earmarks, the special pork projects members of Congress secure often without hearings, notice or even disclosure of the direct recipient. Rep. John Boehner, the new House majority leader, laments that Congress has “become addicted to earmarks as if it were opium.” President Bush belatedly told the nation in his State of the Union address that “the federal budget has too many special-interest projects.”

Fine rhetoric, but if something drastic isn’t done, earmarks will largely survive the calls for reform. Alaska’s Sen. Ted Stevens, who has spent 37 years in Congress raiding the federal Treasury on behalf of his state, dismisses the notion that anything should threaten Alaska’s status as the No. 1 state for pork. In 2005, it hauled in $984.85 worth of pork for every resident.

Last week Mr. Stevens went so far as to chide Capitol Hill reporters for even listening to earmark critics such as Sens. John McCain and Tom Coburn. “You guys fall for it and give them publicity,” he said, and no one can doubt his authority. If anyone knows about publicity, it’s the man who gave his name to Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport.

Hey, speaking of publicity, this should help Stevens pull ahead of Robert Byrd in the neck-and-neck race for the number one spot in the Porkbusters Hall of Shame! Meanwhile, Fund continues:

Earmarks represent a looming political disaster for the GOP. Last year Congress authorized a record 13,999 earmarks. The scandals surrounding just a few of them involving disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and ex-Rep. Duke Cunningham have sent reporters scurrying to find what other nuggets of news might be buried in the remainder. If just 1% of the earmarks turn out to be embarrassing, that’s 140 stories. If a mere 0.1% turn out to be legally questionable, that’s 14 front-page exposés between now and the November election. Because they are in charge of Congress, Republicans will take the brunt of any political fallout, even though Democrats routinely secure an estimated 45% of earmark spending.

And the stories keep coming. A major newsmagazine is working on a piece exploring the bosom-buddy relationships some lobbyists for earmarks have with key appropriators. The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that House Appropriations chairman Jerry Lewis has steered hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds to clients of lobbyist Bill Lowery, a former congressman who is so close to Mr. Lewis that they have exchanged two key staff members, “making their offices so intermingled that they seem to be extensions of each other.”

Looming disaster, indeed.

CATHY YOUNG writes on boys and education. (Via who else?)

TIM WORSTALL:

American capitalism really is a harsh taskmaster, isn’t it? Those excessively long hours that everyone works, so different from the ease and leisure that applies in Europe . . . . The thing is, for all the complaints about and pointing at the way in which the American work-week has been rising over the decades there’s one uncomfortable little fact (or, depending upon how you look at it, hugely comforting one): At the same time as everyone has been working ever harder for The Man — and getting nowhere according to the doomsayers — it’s also true that Americans have been getting ever more leisure time.

Read the whole thing.

LIKE TED KENNEDY AND DICK DURBIN, Al Franken seems unused to actually answering questions.

MICKEY KAUS offers praise for Ayatollah Sistani. So do I.

JOHN MCCAIN seems deeply unhappy with Barack Obama:

Dear Senator Obama:

I would like to apologize to you for assuming that your private assurances to me regarding your desire to cooperate in our efforts to negotiate bipartisan lobbying reform legislation were sincere. When you approached me and insisted that despite your leadership’s preference to use the issue to gain a political advantage in the 2006 elections, you were personally committed to achieving a result that would reflect credit on the entire Senate and offer the country a better example of political leadership, I concluded your professed concern for the institution and the public interest was genuine and admirable. Thank you for disabusing me of such notions.

Ouch. Read the whole thing. (Via Austin Bay). I don’t know who’s right on this — if McCain’s lobbying reform legislation is anything like his campaign finance “reform” legislation, I’d side with Obama. But writing — and publicizing — a letter like this (it’s on McCain’s website) is quite unusual for the Senate.

UPDATE: Obama responds.

“SQUEAL LIKE A PIG:” Heh.

CARTOON WARS UPDATE: Zeyad is back blogging, and he’s not happy:

I only saw these images of Muslim protestors in London today. For the life of me, I cannot understand how the British police let those demonstrators get away with it. The protestors are blasting free speech in Europe, yet they are using that same free speech to call for murder and bloodshed. I would strongly support deporting those people back to the miserable societies they originally came from.

Ouch.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: The contest is heating up over at the Pork Hall of Shame. Right now it’s neck-and-neck between Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) and Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV).

The first prize ought to be retirement, of course. . . .

PAUL MIRENGOFF couldn’t get a straight answer out of Dick Durbin, but he enjoyed the interview anyway. “If this is what reporters get to do regularly, I may have made a bad career choice.”

UPDATE: An interesting bit from Mark Tapscott:

A veteran Senate GOP staffer who requested anonymity offered this observation about the significance of the Durbin-Mirengoff exchange:

“The mainstream news media that covers Congress is tightly controlled by the House and Senate press galleries and they would never be so aggressive in pressing a Member of Congress. So this was big, it was unprecedented to have a blogger asking such questions. We need more bloggers up here asking questions because they aren’t controlled by the galleries.”

I agree, the more bloggers are covering Congress, the more likely it is that Members will be asked and, as Durbin discovered today, have to answer questions they never expect to hear from mainstream journalists.

It is exactly the kind of aggressive, don’t-let’em-off-the-hook questioning by Mirengoff that I have long lamented as being a thing of the past among establishment media journalists. They are either afraid to ask the tough questions, or they don’t know the tough questions.

So come on up to Capitol Hill, bloggers!

Oh, I think you can count on that.

MORE: Reader C.J. Burch emails:

If that sort of questioning, which as Bill Quick points out, is relatively mild for the internet, discombobulates Senators so thoroughly then the Senate is going to have a rocky, rocky future.

Yes, there was nothing rude about the questions; they were just, you know, actual questions.

EUGENE VOLOKH: “The important thing is not knowing how to multiply, but what, when, and why to multiply.”

Indeed.

RALPH KINNEY BENNETT mostly likes the Sony eBook:

The Sony Reader, in case you haven’t heard about it yet, is a device about the size and shape of an average book. Weighing a little over 8 ounces, it’s basically a hand-held screen on which you can read a book page by page. The device, which will go on sale this April, uses a technology called “E ink” to display book pages in a form which Sony claims comes closer than ever to the experience of actually reading off the paper page.

Those who saw it at the big gadget fest in Las Vegas recently marveled at the readability of the device and seemed to agree with Sony’s claim. There are no electronic jitters, no backlit screen (you need light to see the Sony Reader, just like any book) and therefore, such is the claim, none of the tired eyes and headaches common to staring at PC screens and other devices.

E-ink is a cool bit of micro-technology — microscopic white and black ink capsules suspended in a thin layer of clear fluid beneath the surface of the device’s screen, which is in effect a blank page until electrically charged. A negative (black) or positive (white) electric charge brings the proper capsules to the surface of the “paper” to print the page you are reading. When you have finished that page, you press a button and “turn” to the next. It’s kind of like “Etch-A-Sketch goes to MIT.”

So far e-books have all been pretty unimpressive, but maybe this one’s good enough to compete with paper. But who wants a book with DRM? And you know that’s going to be part of the package.

DICK DURBIN, interviewed.

UPDATE: Heh.

There’s video at NSA Files.

JANET RENO AND WALTER DELLINGER on Presidential power.

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt thinks the Senate should put the NSA program to a vote.

MODERATE MUSLIMS offer this apology for the cartoon wars. Excerpt:

We condemn the shameful actions carried out by a few Arabs and Muslims around the world that have tarnished our image, and presented us as intolerant and close-minded bigots.

Anyone offended by the content of a publication has a vast choice of democratic and respectful methods of seeking redress. The most obvious are not buying the publication, writing letters to the editor or expressing their opinions in other venues. It is also possible to use one’s free choice in a democracy to conduct a boycott of the publication, and even a boycott of firms dealing with it. Yet an indiscriminate boycott of all the country’s firms is simply uncalled for and counter-productive. We would be allowing the extremists on both sides to prevail, while punishing the government and the whole population for the actions of an unrepresentative irresponsible few.

We apologize whole-heartedly to the people of Norway and Denmark for any offense this sorry episode may have caused, to any European who has been harassed or intimidated, to the staff of the Danish, Norwegian and Swedish Embassies in Syria whose workplace has been destroyed and for any distress this whole affair may have caused to anyone.

Read the whole thing.

THERE’S LOTS MORE on the surveillance issue over at NSA Files.

APPARENTLY, I HAVEN’T BEEN SHILLING HARD ENOUGH: In response to my post below about what to do with the ArmyofDavids.com domain, reader Harry Chittenden emails:

I hit your blog (and enjoy it) several times a week. This morning was the first time that I realized that you are selling a book.

Well, in case you missed it too — yes, I am! You can buy it from Amazon or BarnesandNoble.com. And please do!

More information can be found here.

AUSTIN BAY has more thoughts on the Cartoon War.

UPDATE: Virginia Postrel writes:

My response to this nonsense is to wonder why Muslims don’t grow up. If your co-religionists are going to take political stands, and blow up innocent people in the name of Islam, political cartoonists are going to occasionally take satirical swipes at your religion. Those swipes may not be nuanced, but they’re what you can expect when you live in a free society, where you, too, can hold views others find offensive. If you don’t like it, move to Saudi Arabia. Or just try to peacefully convert people to Islam. As Fred Barnes points out, the current cover of Rolling Stone is offensive to (hypersensitive, paranoid, publicity-seeking) Christians, but they aren’t threatening anyone with physical violence.

Once they see how easily media and government officials are intimidated by such threats, of course, that may change — which is yet another reason why appeasement is a bad approach.

Victor Davis Hanson, meanwhile, wonders if Europe is finally waking up: “The Madrid bombings, the murder of Theo van Gogh, the London subway attacks, and the French rioting in October and November seem to have prompted at least some Europeans at last to question their once hallowed sense of multiculturalism in which Muslim minorities were not asked to assimilate at home and Islamic terrorists abroad were seen as mere militants or extremists rather than enemies bent on destroying the West. . . . More importantly, despite distancing themselves from the United States, and spreading cash liberally around, the Europeans are beginning to fathom that the radical Islamists still hate them even more than they do the Americans—as if the fundamentalists add disdain for perceived European weakness in addition to the usual generic hatred of all things Western.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Tamara Mady emails:

Coming from an all Muslim family, I’m forced to listen to the sense of perceived injustice of Muslims concerning the depiction of their revered prophet. It’s quite sickening.

I tell my family that that’s just how things work in a free society: while I don’t agree that the newspaper should have done something so culturally insensitive, they do have the right to do that, and attempting to make Danish society pay as a whole for it is utterly ridiculous.

It doesn’t matter, I’m told. It literally means nothing to them, because in their world, everything should revolve around them and their culture, and God made the world for Muslim Arabs to control.

And this is the kind of mindset the Danish people are contending with.

Given the tremendous weakness of the Muslim — and particularly the Arab Muslim — world this is an extremely unfortunate view to hold, and one that is likely to have serious consequences if it is not unlearned.

MORE: Even in the satire wars these guys are outgunned.

STILL MORE: Related thoughts from Dr. Sanity.

SO I REGISTERED ARMYOFDAVIDS.COM a while back, but at the moment all it does is point to the book page at Amazon. Should I set up a separate webpage just for the book? Or is InstaPundit enough? Any advice or suggestions?

IS OLD EUROPE DOOMED? That’s the question asked by Theodore Dalrymple in his lead-off essay for another Cato Unbound symposium.

I also continue to be impressed with Claire Berlinski’s book.

NSA FILES is a new Pajamas Media blog on today’s NSA surveillance hearings. Andrew Marcus will be there and filing video reports later today.

IF YOU WERE OFFLINE this weekend, don’t miss this podcast featuring Austin Bay, Jim Dunnigan, Lynne Kiesling, Roger Stern, and Michael Yon. Note that the “Podcasts” tab at the top takes you to an archive of podcasts. And in light of an email I just got, it’s worth stressing again that you don’t need an iPod to listen to podcasts — just click on the link and they’ll play on your computer.