THE CONSUMERIST REPORTS on an effort to shut down a blogger. No, criticizing someone’s product on your blog isn’t trademark infringement. Jeez.

THE NEW TALENT HAS ARRIVED at Wonkette, which is undoubtedly a relief to those who didn’t like the lame substitute bloggers such as myself. Background on the new guys is here.

PHILIP BOBBITT writes on eavedropping in the New York Times, and as always it’s interesting. Austin Bay has thoughts, too.

THE ROYAL CANADIAN MOUNTED POLICE: Another mess confronting Harper, apparently.

BRIAN TRANSEAU (“BT”) is one of my favorite musicians (I especially recommend his Movement in Still Life, and the 10 Years in the Life collection is also great). I just noticed that he’s started blogging, and he’s currently complaining about bogus lawsuits by “some ambulance chaser attorney working on a percentage with nothing better to do than try to force a settlement with a huge corporation.” The case certainly sounds bogus.

UPDATE: I think I mentioned this before, but since this is a music post I’ll note that Mobius Dick’s Embrace the Machine is now available on iTunes.

MICHAEL BARONE:

I haven’t seen a defense of pork barrel spending in the blogosphere recently, so let me make one. The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to argue that pork barrel spending was politically benign because it was one way for an administration or for the congressional leadership to hold together a majority that could act decisively on other, more important issues.

Expensive, perhaps, but a small price to pay in order to assure functioning government.

Such unwritten-constitution arrangements, however, require self-discipline to function properly. That seems to be in exceptionally short supply among our political class today.

MORE ON THE HOUSE MAJORITY LEADER RACE:

Has the political “CW” been wrong before? Too many times to recall. But for a number of reasons (among them Shadegg’s rock star support in the conservative blogsophere and the absence of the sort of MSM scrutiny which Boehner and Blunt were subject to at the race’s outset) the momentum that had carried Blunt’s candidacy to the brink of inevitability a few weeks ago has hit a wall.

Read the whole thing.

I’M GLAD TO HEAR ABOUT THIS:

In the confusion of this post-Cold War, terrorist-troubled world, Congress is betting more and more foreign aid dollars on fighting that one common foe everyone can agree upon: infectious disease.

“Medicine can be a currency for peace” says Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a surgeon and a force behind the change. Today that “currency” is near $4 billion — almost triple in real dollars what the U.S. was providing per year in 2001.

That increase parallels — and is energized by — efforts by private philanthropists like billionaire Bill Gates, who pledged Friday to triple his contributions to fight tuberculosis. Democrats have almost uniformly backed the shift. More striking has been rising support from Republicans, drawing in both the religious right and old-line fiscal conservatives who long have opposed more traditional development programs.

Faster, please.

BUSH BREAKS FIFTY PERCENT APPROVAL on the Rasmussen poll. He’s been trending up there for several days. I’m not sure why, but it seems as if he does better whenever John Kerry and Ted Kennedy get face time on the national news. The Democrats would be wise to let other people represent them.

USING WOUNDED TROOPS to support a filibuster on Alito. Can this really be true? I hope it’s not.

A LIE DETECTOR THAT really works: Boon, or Orwellian nightmare?

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Here’s a fairly encouraging report on how things are going:

These are dark days for earmarks, more commonly known as “pork.”

Packing bills with special provisions has long been a tradition in Congress, but a pall has fallen over the practice. Bolstered by a budget crisis and a series of scandals involving legislative favors, an increasingly prolific government watchdog movement is turning pork into a four-letter word. . . .

The watchdogs work closely with friendly lawmakers, such as Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, who tried to redirect funding for the “Bridge to Nowhere” to a New Orleans bridge ruined by Katrina. The informal investigative alliance also includes Internet bloggers, including a “porkbusters” campaign on the site TruthLaidBear.com, an online effort to mobilize against wasteful federal spending.

“It’s a $2.4 trillion budget,” said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense. “There’s work for everybody.”

Congress is embarrassed enough by the Cunningham and Jack Abramoff scandals, both involving huge sums of cash for legislative favors, that lawmakers are considering ways to crack down on earmarks, which typically show up in bills at the last minute, after little or no scrutiny. The watchdog groups are wary that Congress will focus on lobbying activities, rather than clean up the legislative process.

Indeed. Now let’s see how the Majority Leader race goes.

CHANGING THE NATURAL ORDER:

Last year’s record hurricane season didn’t just change life for humans. It changed nature, too.

Everywhere scientists look, they see disrupted patterns in and along the Gulf of Mexico. Coral reefs, flocks of sea birds, crab- and shrimp-filled meadows and dune-crowned beaches were wrapped up in _ and altered by _ the force of hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Dennis.

“Nothing’s been like this,” said Abby Sallenger, a U.S. Geological Survey oceanographer, during a recent flight over the northern Gulf Coast to study shoreline changes.

The political landscape seems to have been reshaped, too:

“I think the most polite term that you can use is disarray,” said Elliott Stonecipher, a Louisiana pollster and political analyst. “The party apparatus seems to have taken a knockdown, if not a knockout punch.”

The last party chairman, Jim Bernhard, resigned less than three weeks after Katrina roared ashore Aug. 29, nine months into the job.

Bernhard said he needed to focus on his engineering and construction company, The Shaw Group Inc., but critics said he needed to resign to avoid allegations of favoritism as Shaw received millions of dollars in post-hurricane rebuilding contracts.

Bernhard had replaced Mike Skinner, a former U.S. attorney who left the chairmanship after a series of disappointments in the 2004 congressional elections, including the election of Republican David Vitter to the U.S. Senate.

On paper, the party is still dominant, with about 1.6 million Democratic voters in Louisiana to 694,000 Republicans, according to January voter registration numbers from the secretary of state’s office. About 600,000 are registered with other party affiliations.

However, Democratic voter rolls are shrinking while the number of registered Republications has grown in recent years.

Actually, the problems seem to precede Katrina.