MORE ON THE RIAA AS A DEFENDANT.

COMPETING CLOCKS ON IRAQ: “the military clock in Baghdad, the Iraqi government clock, and the US political clock in Washington.” Biggest strategic bind: “the U.S. political cycle.”

FRED THOMPSON ON LOBBYING, at Ed Morrissey’s place.

AMAR BAKSHI IS TRAVELING THE WORLD, asking people what they think of America on video.

A LOOK AT CHINA’S WAR IN SPACE:

Every industrialized country relies on satellites every day, for everything from computer networking technology to telecommunications, navigation, weather prediction, television and radio. This makes satellites especially vulnerable targets. Imagine the U.S. military suddenly without guidance for its soldiers and weapons systems, and its civilians without storm warnings or telephones.

Some satellites, however, are at greater risk than others. Most spacecraft — including spy sats — are in low Earth orbit, which stretches 1240 miles into space. As the Chinese test proved, such targets could be hit with medium-range missiles tipped with crude kill devices. GPS satellites are far higher, orbiting at about 12,600 miles. Many communications sats are in the 22,000-mile range. Destroying them requires a much more powerful and sophisticated long-range ballistic missile — yet it can be done. “You’d need a sky-sweeping capability to comprehensively negate a space support system that is scattered all over,” says John Pike, a space analyst at GlobalSecurity.org. “You’d need ICBM-size boosters — hundreds of them.”

Such an all-out satellite war would render space useless for decades to come. “There’d be so much debris up there,” Clark says, “that it wouldn’t be safe to put anything up in space.”

I’d be very upset if that happened.

MORE VIDEO OF protests in Tehran.

UPDATE: Also, Iran’s self-sanctions.

EARMARKS IN THE IMMIGRATION BILL.

CHINA DEVELOPS A BAD BRAND IMAGE: “As a country develops and moves up the consumer supply chain, they generally acquire a reputation for making high-quality goods (think Japan and South Korea). What’s interesting is that China seems to be moving in the opposite direction.”

QUIETLY MAKING NOISE.

Read this, too.

PREDICTION: Right now it’s Democrats pushing a return to the “Fairness Doctrine,” but they’ll soon be joined by Republicans tired of things like this, and there will be pressure to extend regulation to the Internet. Incumbistan will unite under threat from outside.

I’D RATHER THAT I PAID WARREN BUFFETT’S TAX RATE than that he paid mine.

SCOTT JOHNSON:

Virtually everything important that is happening with respect to the immigration bill seems to be happening under the surface, away from the eyes of prying journalists and concerned citizens. The procedural maneuvering is incomprehensible. The substance of the amendments before the Senate is extraordinarily difficult if not overwhelming given the limited time allowed for their consideration.

I have only my intuition to go on. My intuition tells me that it is impossible to be cynical enough about what is transpiring here.

And why is intuition important? Lack of information. Here’s a comment from an open thread at the Volokh Conspiracy:

The problem as I see it, is that most of us don’t really understand the bill all that well. And Congress is really to blame for that – my impression is that it was not drafted out in the open, it is quite large, and amendments are not welcome. Plus, it seems like it is being rushed, possibly because the more that the people know what’s in it, the more they are likely to complain.

Indeed. And some thoughts from Rich Hailey: Read the whole thing.

CHENEY’S OFFICE SEEMS TO HAVE ABANDONED the claim that he’s actually a legislator.

HERE’S MORE ON the situation in Iran.

NIFONG NEWS CONTINUES TO UNFOLD, and K.C. Johnson continues to keep track of it.

MORE ON JON BRUNING, who’s challenging Chuck Hagel in the primary.

WALT MOSSBERG TRIED THE IPHONE FOR TWO WEEKS and liked it pretty well. And to my surprise, the lack of tactile feedback didn’t matter to him: “The iPhone’s most controversial feature, the omission of a physical keyboard in favor of a virtual keyboard on the screen, turned out in our tests to be a nonissue, despite our deep initial skepticism. After five days of use, Walt — who did most of the testing for this review — was able to type on it as quickly and accurately as he could on the Palm Treo he has used for years.”

On the other hand, there’s a major drawback: you’re stuck with AT&T cell service.

UPDATE: Reader Zachary Bennett emails: “what’s wrong with AT&T cell service?”

Possibly nothing, but you don’t get a choice. I’d have to quit my contract with U.S. Cellular, for example, to buy an iPhone.

I AGREE:

It’s the birthday of Rudy “Rudolph” Perpich, governor of Minnesota. Among his notable accomplishments: he sent the National Guard to calm down the bitter Spam Strike of 1986, and he signed the law that bumped the drinking age up to 21. It’s a cliché, yes, but it’s still a reasonable argument: if the state will trust you to herd strikers with a rifle when you’re 18, why won’t they trust you with a beer?

Why, indeed? If anyone actually cared about the youth vote, they’d back a rollback in the drinking age.

IN THE MAIL: Joe Bageant’s Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War.

A LOOK AT THE SITUATION IN IRAQ from USA Today.

HIGH INSTITUTIONAL STANDARDS: So I emailed my Associate Dean that I’m now up to #11 on the Social Science Research Network list of top legal scholars. His response: “Most excellent, but head for single digits.”

Excelsior!

SOME THOUGHTS ON DIANNE FEINSTEIN’S PLAN TO bring back the “fairness doctrine:”

What Feinstein really wants is for federal bureaucrats to decide what political opinion programming we should hear. She presumes to know better than listeners what is “fair.” . . . What is especially revealing about these trial balloons for renewed regulation of political speech is that America already has an incredible diversity of media giving vent to opinion and commentary on every conceivable issue in public policy. Thanks to the Internet, America is in the midst of an unprecedented political news and commentary explosion. Anybody with an opinion can start a blog that can be read by anyone in the world with an Internet connection. There are literally millions of political blogs, podcasts, video blogs and blog-based radio operations providing analyses from every conceivable ideological position.

Political expression in America is being liberated as has never before been done in human history. Why does that bother Feinstein, Boxer, Clinton, Kucinich and other Fairness Doctrine advocates?

Read the whole thing.

IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, something positive: “It is a measure of soaring Kurdish optimism that government officials here talk seriously about one day challenging Dubai as the Middle East’s main transportation and business hub. The Kurdistan Regional Government is betting that it can, investing $325 million in a modern terminal at the Erbil International Airport to handle, officials hope, millions of passengers a year, and a three-mile runway that will be big enough for the new double-decker Airbus A380.”

THE IMMIGRATION AMENDMENTS ARE ONLINE in searchable format, courtesy of N.Z. Bear.