A LOOK AT AL QAEDA’S WORKING PAPER for a media invasion of America.

BEAM ME UP, OSAMA: My TCS Daily column is up.

THE GLENN AND HELEN SHOW is one of the featured political podcasts in iTunes’ pre-election roundup. Go to the main podcast page in iTunes, or click here. It’s kind of cool to see our basement production up there with PBS, the Washington Post, and NPR.

We’ll have an interview with Secretary of the Army Francis Harvey up later this morning, talking about force structure, recruitment and retention, and more.

WAS NORTH KOREA’S BLAST A SUITCASE NUKE? Richard Miniter has investigated, and reports that it’s not likely.

THE DEATH OF CURSIVE:

When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.

I’ll take neat printing over sloppy cursive any day, and — take it from a guy who’s graded a lot of bluebooks — nearly all the cursive you see is sloppy. It’s hard to find someone under 70 with nice, traditional penmanship.

Is it a loss that people don’t have beautiful cursive? In the abstract, maybe, but kids have lots of more important stuff to learn.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Stopping bleeding with a self-assembling nanogel. Sounds pretty cool. (Via Magic Statistics).

A BLEGBURST? I hope this doesn’t catch on. . . .

Seriously, if you like Bob Owens’ work, support him with a donation.

NORTH KOREA’S NEIGHBORS are more worried about collapse and refugees than nukes, according to this Wall Street Journal report. (Free link).

WHOOPING COUGH IS BACK: “State laws that make it easy for children to skip school-required vaccinations may be contributing to whooping cough outbreaks around the country, a study suggests. . . . Compared with stricter states, those with easy exemption policies had about 50 percent more whooping cough cases, according to the study. Also, about 50 percent more people got whooping cough in states that allowed personal-belief exemptions, compared with those allowing only religious exemptions, the study found.”

I wrote a column on a related topic a while back. It’s here. Bottom line: “Drugmakers get sued for defective products; ‘activists’ and sensational journalists do not. If I were to start a drug company, and peddle a drug with no more evidence of its safety and efficacy than anti-vaccine activists and their media allies had to peddle their approach, and if as many people were made sick, or killed, as a result, I’d probably be in jail now. So where’s the accountability for the people whose bogus claims and hysterical coverage led to this situation? Nowhere in sight. With that sort of an incentive structure, we’re lucky that we’re not in worse shape.”

UPDATE: Reader Paul Strasser emails:

Take it from an adult who got whooping cough two summers ago. It sucks, big time. My son first got it from some kid at school whose parents believed that the vaccine was dangerous. The kid got it, and transferred it to my son, who then gave it to me. It was god-awful. But even worse was listening to my son cough so loud, so hard, then actually have to gasp and gulp for a breath of air – every few minutes you think your child is suffocating. Every time he did this (and he was a trooper, bless his soul) I silently swore a blood oath against those damn parents who think that vaccines are evil. No, the parents were inconsiderate, stupid bastards.

Yes, both my son and I had our vaccines.

The vaccines, alas, aren’t perfect — and because of that, it’s important that enough people be vaccinated to prevent transmission. If you don’t have enough vaccinated people to produce “herd immunity” then the level of protection is lower for everyone, even those who get the shots.

ANOTHER RECORD HIGH FOR THE DOW, but nobody seems to care much. Worrying about “the economy, stupid” is so 1990s.

KNOXVILLE MAYOR BILL HASLAM is reportedly backing away from Mayor Bloomberg’s anti-gun initiative at full speed, but it’s not helping as much as he might hope:

I’m uncertain if Haslam’s membership in the anti-gun Mayors Against Guns Alliance was intentional or an oversight. However, neither option portrays him in a positive light. He is either against guns or doesn’t have any idea what he did. Haslam is tied pretty heavily to the Bob Corker campaign. This little incident may cost Corker some votes. Maybe someone should ask Corker that in his debate tonight?

Ouch. Bad news all around. Plus, poor communications.

UPDATE: Audio of Haslam defending his position can be found here.

BEING A CONGRESSIONAL SPOUSE can really pay. And, once again, it hardly seems to matter which party is involved.

I AGREE WITH ANN ALTHOUSE: It’s a good thing that nobody is showing this ad. It’s a regular triumph of good taste that it’s not being shown anywhere at all. . . .

Though I’m glad I got to watch Kim Jong Il slam-dunking, even if it was in a commercial that no one at all will ever see. Because, you know, they’re not showing it anywhere.

BRAD RUBENSTEIN is blogging the Web 2.0 Kongress in Frankfurt. Just keep scrolling.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION IS VERY UNPOPULAR AMONG TENNESSEANS, according to a new statewide poll. I guess that explains why Harold Ford, Jr. has been taking such a strong position against it.

MICHAEL YON: “A very well-placed government source told me Tuesday afternoon that the North Korean explosion was non-nuclear.” He also suggests that even though the test was in North Korea, it may have been by or on behalf of the Iranians.

AUSTIN BAY has more thoughts on North Korea: “Time to hermetically seal the Hermit Kingdom.”

DAVE KOPEL looks at training to resist school shootings.

JOHN MCCAIN is guestblogging at Captain’s Quarters, with a post on North Korea.

BYPASSING THE BEEB, CONT’D: 18 Doughty Street, the British Internet television network I mentioned earlier, is now up and running. Check it out.

IN THE MAIL: My former student Elizabeth Price Foley’s new book, Liberty for All: Reclaiming Individual Privacy in a New Era of Public Morality. It’s an excellent book — somewhat Randy Barnett-ish in approach — and it’s already won a Lysander Spooner Award. I’m pleased that it’s out, and more pleased still that it’s out from Yale University Press.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: FedSpending.org, a new transparency website created by OMB Watch, lets you search over $12 Trillion of federal spending for free.

You can also see a webcast of its unveiling here.

Bit by bit, this stuff is becoming more accessible. Will that make a difference?

It will, if people want it to make a difference.

And they should.

PUMPING OUT THE VOTE: Bill Bradley writes: “As he steams smartly toward hoped for re-election four weeks from today, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has a secret weapon, the largest and most technologically sophisticated voter mobilization operation California Republicans have ever seen.”

UPDATE: Reader Michael McFatter emails:

It’s not just California. Rove has been refining this machine for the last three elections and some smaller ones in between. This is the real reason they call him The Architect. When you hear The Architect you should think The Matrix, not building designer. This guy pioneered direct mail for politics in the 80’s to extraordinary success. Every election the system gets better. He experiments every election too, in select districts to see if new strategies work and then collects huge amounts of data back after the election. Newsweek had an article that brushed the surface of this, but it got buried under the Foley scandal. I think there are going to be some very, very surprised Democrats come November 8. It doesn’t matter if you lead at the polls if the other guy gets 95% of his supporters to cast their vote and you can only manage 65%.

A lot of Republicans are counting on this. But will the supporters turn out this time? Only if the Democrats overplay their hand as usual.

STEVEN DEN BESTE looks at voodoo politics.

THOMAS BARNETT says that Bush is blowing it on North Korea: “Beijing isn’t ready, in large part, because we haven’t prepared them well to emerge as a trusted great power ally. This administration keeps hedging its bets, sort of treating China like a military enemy, sort of treating it like a diplomatic ally, sometimes demonizing it and sometimes indulging it. Our ‘separate lanes’ policy of trying to compartmentalize our relationship with China has been a disaster in my opinion, keeping us trapped in an immature strategic relationship with Beijing that makes it harder for us to deal with rogues like Iran and North Korea. . . . We tolerate Russia and India and China instead of embracing them as key allies, and we indulge the Japanese and Europeans, when neither has shown much inclination to grow up strategically any time soon (although I have my hopes for Abe as the next iteration in Tokyo). Bush and Co. define the new era all right. They just don’t seem to recognize that a lot of players have changed sides in the meantime. ”