WRITER’S STRIKE UPDATE: Notes from the sidewalk.

DUMB LAW OF THE WEEK: “New Jersey enacted legislation on Thursday banning some convicted sex offenders from using the Internet.”

We should ban felons from New Jersey politics, too, but then who’d be left to run the state?

A SPACE JUNK update from Popular Science.

GOOGLEBOMB, or GoogleDud?

BEEN A LONG TIME SINCE I ROCK AND ROLLED: I don’t listen to much rock anymore; as James Lileks said a while back, “Techno does for me now what rock used to. Why, I couldn’t care less.” But I had to drive across town and popped in a Heart album and it was quite good. Crazy on You is without a doubt the best Cold War-inspired song about oral sex ever. Other tunes held up well, too.

HEH.

LOOKING BACK at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show, and what promises came true, and didn’t. My reporting from last year’s CES is here. And here’s that 108″ Sharp flat-screen TV they’re talking about.

ADVICE: “Barack — may I call you Barack? — this is not going to help. Apart from the absurdity of claiming that the housing conditions of one’s grandmother amount to foreign policy experience, no Iowan who has been as successful as Barack Obama would let his grandmother live in a ‘tiny hut.’ Somebody ought to take up a collection for the poor woman.”

CHRIS DODD unloads on Obama and Clinton. He’s not very nice to Bill Richardson, either.

DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY: I linked this review of Jonah Goldberg’s book last night, and a reader pointed out that the text reference to Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration contained a hyperlink to articles about the National Rifle Association. The error is still there this afternoon. Despite having the same initials, those are not the same . . . .

I’m sure that mistake is not the fault of David Oshinsky, the reviewer, but rather of some undereducated staffer at the Times, but it serves to illustrate the need for the kind of history lesson Goldberg offers, as well as a point made by many, that the NYT doesn’t take its hyperlinks very seriously.

UPDATE: Ouch: “The NYT should be making a conspicuous show of its professionalism and superior resources on the web, but instead it is making mistakes that would mortify me — in my little one-person operation.”

WHY WE’RE IN THE PERSIAN GULF.

HILLARY CLINTON SOCK PUPPETS.

Should’ve hired an expert!

MICHAEL BARONE: Lessons from the Surge.

A BIG PAKISTAN ROUNDUP from Jules Crittenden.

A LAME CHRISTMAS VIDEO that takes the cake:

Via FrontBurner.

HERE’S PROF. KENNETH ANDERSON’S REVIEW of Jack Goldsmith’s The Terror Presidency. Our podcast interview with Goldsmith is here.

MORE ON THE PROBLEMS AT HARPER’S.

DUDES, YOU’RE BEHIND THE CURVE: This is the blender to have.

HUCKABEE SLIPPING? I don’t think polls are much use in predicting the Iowa caucuses, but we’ll know soon enough.

SAUDI ARABIAN nanotechnology.

JOHN EDWARDS: Obama living in Never-Never Land.

The former North Carolina senator labeled “ridiculous” comments made by the Obama campaign that seemed to link former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s assassination to Sen. Hillary Clinton’s vote to authorize the use of force against Iraq, embraced Sen. Barack Obama’s politics over Clinton’s, and said an anti-Obama flier from a pro-Clinton union was “misleading” and “deceptive.”

Ouch.

HUCKABEE’S BAD WEEK continues.

More here, including video.

WHAT’S ON Tom Goldstein’s iPhone.

MICHAEL YOUNG LOOKS FOR NEOCONS IN THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION and can’t seem to find any: “So maybe it’s time to stop referring to the neocon policies of the Bush administration. The neocons are gone, many for so long that no one seems to remember their leaving. What we now have in Washington is a mishmash of old political realism and improvisation, topped with increasingly empty oratory on freedom and democracy. That should please quite a few of Bush’s domestic critics. He’s returned to the futile routine in the Middle East that they always urged him to.”

In other words, the bureaucracy won, with predictable results.

BENAZIR BHUTTO MAY BE DEAD, but she’s got a book coming out entitled Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West. Interestingly, the Insta-Wife used to babysit for Bhutto’s agent, Andrew Wylie. Well, it’s interesting to me, anyway.