THE EXAMINER:

Something almost without precedent in America will happen Thursday. That’s the day when McCain-Feingold — aka the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 — will officially silence broadcast advertising that contains criticism of members of Congress seeking re-election in November. Before 2006, American election campaigns traditionally began in earnest after Labor Day. Unless McCain-Feingold is repealed, Labor Day will henceforth mark the point in the campaign when congressional incumbents can sit back and cruise, free of those pesky negative TV and radio spots. It is the most effective incumbent protection act possible, short of abolishing the elections themselves.

It’s wrong, it’s unAmerican, and it’s the single best argument against either McCain or Feingold running for President in 2008. (Via John Hawkins).

UPDATE: SayUncle notes a blogger response.

WHO SHOULD REPLACE KOFI AT THE U.N.? “Tony Soprano. He’d steal less. He wouldn’t take any shit from anybody and a UN Resolution would be enforced, or else.”

Sadly, this makes sense.

JUDGE J. HARVIE WILKINSON comes out against anti-gay marriage amendments at both the state and federal level:

Is it too much to ask that judges and legislatures acknowledge the difficulty of this debate by leaving it to normal democratic processes? In fact, the more passionate an issue, the less justification there often is for constitutionalizing it. Constitutions tempt those who are way too sure they are right. Certainty is, to be sure, a constant feature of our politics — some certainties endure; others are fated to be supplanted by the certainties of a succeeding age. Neither we nor the Framers can be sure which is which, but the Framers were sure that we should debate our differences in this day’s time and arena. It is sad that the state of James Madison and John Marshall will in all likelihood forsake their example of limited constitutionalism this fall. Their message is as clear today as it was at the founding: Leave constitutions alone.

I agree.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: The Hill reports that members of Congress aren’t just keeping us in the dark — they’re also keeping each other ignorant:

House leaders have vowed to improve transparency in the earmarking system, whether or not Congress passes a broader lobbying reform law this year. But critics note that the proposed reforms would neither eliminate appropriations earmarks nor address the prevalence of earmarks in tax and authorization bills.

Scott Lilly, a former Democratic staff director for the Appropriations Committee who now works at the liberal Center for American Progress (CAP), argues that the lack of transparency stems from a desire among appropriators to keep their colleagues in the dark when it comes to the process for apportioning earmarks.

“If every member of the House has a complete listing of what every other member got, he can immediately begin to compare his standing in the institution, his support of the committee on key votes, and any other factor that might arguably serve as a basis for determining the distribution of earmarks with members of the House who got more than he or she did in earmarks,” Lilly wrote in a column posted on CAP’s website.

Read the whole thing.

CAM EDWARDS looks at the AHSA, an astroturf “moderate” gun-rights group that’s been touted in The New Republic. It’s got big name supporters, rich-guy backing, and press folks willing to misrepresent its nature and history. It’s got everything but members! As Jim Geraghty comments: “Dude, 150 members. You get more than that in one theater of a large multiplex on a Friday Night. About ten or eleven rows of seats in the Meadowlands.”

UPDATE: A reader emails:

150 members? That’s about as many members as the New Jersey Coalition For Self Defense, a genuine grassroots group I had a hand in launching a few years back. (http://www.njcsd.org)

Of course, the NJCSD has no rich guy backing, has a press willing to entirely ignore them, a legislature willing to write them off as extremist agitators, its supporters painfully cough up the $20 membership fee, no coffers to speak of, and it is crewed entirely by volunteers who are paid nothing to squeeze a few minutes or hours out of their full work and family day to work for the group’s agenda.

THAT is what grass roots looks like. It’s tiresome, frustrating, and thankless when you’re the voice crying in the RKBA wilderness that is NJ.

Indeed. It’s more fun being astroturf, I imagine.

CATHY SEIPP looks at Katie Couric and the future of CBS. Bottom line: “New anchor, same Titanic.” Plus, an amusing Tom Snyder anecdote.

RON BAILEY PENS A TRIBUTE TO NORMAN BORLAUG, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who actually contributed greatly to human welfare.

THE DEMOCRATS’ PEACE PLAN gets a bad review: “They want Donald Rumsfeld’s head on a pike outside the White House, but they can’t even gin up the courage to use his name in their letter.”

Some people are invoking historical parallels.

DARFUR UPDATE:

After the United States helped broker a Darfur peace deal in May, the United Nations promised to come to the rescue with a peacekeeping force capable of enforcing the accord. But, as Darfur faded from public consciousness, the world body has again proven itself utterly ineffective. As the feeble and largely symbolic African Union force (itself indifferent at best to the continuing rapes and murders) prepares to leave the region in five weeks, Darfur is on the brink of massive human killing with no international force forthcoming. The UN’s own chief of humanitarian operations, Jan Egeland, conceded in a recent interview that mass murder is about to begin on a tremendous scale, while rapes and individual killings are already the rule, not the exception. (Systematic sexual violence against women, we recall, is the hallmark of the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Sudanese regime’s Janjaweed militia in Darfur. Even after they have been driven from their homes into wretched camps, Darfuri women still must venture out to fetch wood and water, putting themselves at risk.)

Read the whole thing.

LOSING CREDIBILITY in the war on terror.

NANOTECHNOLOGY AND DESKTOP MANUFACTURING: An interesting video, though of course the sound effects are evocative rather than authentic.

DISSENT at Dartmouth. Dissent is always patriotic, right?

THE MESS IN MEXICO: A.M. Mora y Leon has a roundup on the political situation in Mexico.

THE JOY OF FLEX: Tom Lutz writes on the real benefit of a professorial lifestyle:

It isn’t the pay scale, which, with a few lucky exceptions, offers the lowest years-of-education-to-income ratio possible. It isn’t really the work itself, either. Yes, teaching and research are rewarding, but we face as much drudgery as in any professional job. Once you’ve read 10,000 freshman essays, you’ve read them all.

But we academics do have something few others possess in this postindustrial world: control over our own time. All the surveys point to this as the most common factor in job satisfaction. The jobs in which decisions are made and the pace set by machines provide the least satisfaction, while those, like mine, that foster at least the illusion of control provide the most.

My first year as a law professor, I noticed that I was actually working more hours than when I was practicing law at a big firm. But it felt much less stressful, because I had much more control over what I was doing, when. As I’ve noticed before, I think that sort of control is also part of the appeal of self-emplyment and cottage industry.

UPDATE: Reader Craig Mason writes: “Regarding your post on ‘The Joy of Flex’–I like a quote from my grad school advisor about being an academic: ‘The best part of being a professor is that you get to work whatever 70 hours a week that you want.'”

That’s about right. But that’s huge.

CLAUDIA ROSETT: “The United Nations is, as Ambassador John Bolton has said, ‘a target-rich environment,’ and keeping up with the Kofi-isms alone can become a full-time job. I’ll try to stick to the top hits, so there is time on this blog for other matters.”

LIKE STEPHEN AMBROSE ON ACID, OR SOMETHING: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. “Brooks tells the story of the world’s desperate battle against the zombie threat with a series of first-person accounts ‘as told to the author’ by various characters around the world.”

Hey, it’s got to be better than this zombie tale.

THOUGHTS ON EARNINGS AND THE ECONOMY: “Would you rather be in the middle 20 percent of the income distribution today or in the top 20 percent 50 years ago?”

Related thoughts here, from Megan McArdle.

UPDATE: First link was bad before. Fixed now — sorry. But here’s a related post from Greg Mankiw.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Some Labor Day economic news, plus a comparison with Europe.

MORE: Today’s problem: “The masses have amassed too much.”

MORE STILL: And, apparently, the masses mass too much, too: “An obesity pandemic threatens to overwhelm health systems around the globe with illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease, experts at an international conference warned Sunday.”

STILL MORE: Exposing “corporate greed at the expense of workers” — in a shocking place. “Is it fair to judge this particular company for the fact that its workers only receive a little more than one-third of the total output of the company? It is — when they condemn the rest of them for paying out only about half.”

Plus, thoughts on the minimum wage.

POWER LINE is podcasting from the Minnesota State Fair.

AUSTIN BAY HAS THOUGHTS on Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin’s death.

MICKEY KAUS on Hillary: “But if the problem is that she’s overly cautious, calculating and chameleon-like–but can raise lots of money–then Senate Minority/Majority Leader might be a good job for her, no?”