A REVIEW OF THE NEW NANCY DREW MOVIE.

UPDATE: And another!

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: More from the better late than never department:

Senate Republicans are squabbling amongst themselves over immigration reform. President Bush is fighting a losing battle with his base. But in the House of Representatives, times couldn’t be better for the GOP.

House Republicans have coalesced around the issue of federal spending, handing Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) a stinging defeat on earmark reform and sending their liberal colleagues a unified message not to exceed the president’s budget requests.

For conservatives who stayed home last Election Day, it’s refreshing to see someone in Washington paying attention again. . . .

What’s most significant about these developments is the way they came about. In both cases, conservative ideas quickly snowballed into party-unifying messages. Boehner and Blunt, both of whom faced challenges from the right for their current leadership posts, have embraced their onetime foes.

Of course, if they’d done this kind of thing a year ago, they might still be in the majority.

ED DRISCOLL HAS THOUGHTS on NBC’s ratings plunge.

And there may be a connection here.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT, IN OAKLAND: George Will reports on how something that would have seemed a P.C. reductio ad absurdum a few years ago is now a reality.

FRED THOMPSON AIMING FOR BLOGGER-IN-CHIEF? “While the Internet and blogs are a basic cornerstone of any modern campaign communications strategy, Thompson has been notably enthusiastic about expressing his thoughts online.”

A HILLARY FAN hiding behind a blog?

THE NEW YORK TIMES LOOKS AT PREPARATIONS FOR CYBERWAR: However extensive they are, though, I suspect they’re both too expensive and inadequate.

The presence of rolling brownouts at the National Security Agency doesn’t inspire confidence.

GOING AFTER BUMPER STICKERS!

I think this says it all.

WHAT MAKES NIFONG DIFFERENT? “The best way to find out the answer to that question is to continue to pay attention to the abuses of prosecutors. If we can’t maintain our attention long enough to see the extent of the problem, then we will know we cared because of the sports and the sex and the race and the elite university.”

Yes, I think prosecutors in general deserve more attention.

ANOTHER INCONVENIENT TRUTH: “National parks were born of disasters.” Kind of a silly piece, really, but with an interestingly contrarian perspective.

CHEMICAL ALI sentenced to death, for the murder of 180,000 Kurds. Much more here.

TIGERHAWK: “Here’s what I want to know: To whom at the Times do I complain about the Public Editor?”

LICKED BY FIRE, KISSED BY SMOKE: Grilling made erotic, I guess.

ROGER SIMON on a lot of Rs.

STRATEGYPAGE:

Both the terrorists and U.S. troops know that victory has been defined as several weeks with no bombs going off in Baghdad. The media is keeping score, and they use their ears and video cameras. No loud bangs and no bodies equals no news. That’s victory.

Not really. The real war is within the Iraqi government. The terrorists lost two years ago, when the relentless slaughter of Moslem civilians turned the Arab world against al Qaeda. Journalists missed that one, but not the historians. The war in Iraq has always been about Arabs demonstrating that they can run a clean government, for the benefit of all the people, not just the tyrants on top. So far, there have lots of victories and defeats in this, and no clear decision overall. Elections have been held several times, but the people elected have proved to be as corrupt and venal as their tyrannical predecessors. Everyone admits that this bad behavior is not a good thing, but attempts to stop it have been only partially successful. Changing thousands of years of custom and tradition is not easy. The clay tablets dug up in the vicinity of Baghdad, reveal similar scandal and despair over four thousand years ago. Most Iraqis realize, however, that if the chain of corruption is not broken, the dreary past will again become a painful present.

Read the whole thing.

CORRECTING SOME MISREPRESENTATIONS ON AL QAEDA.

FORGET THE OLD BOYS NETWORK, Fred Thompson mobilizes the old girlfriends network:

IN the battle for the women’s vote, Fred Thompson has a secret weapon against Hillary Clinton – the legions of former girlfriends who still adore him and who want him to be president.

The Hollywood actor and former Tennessee senator racked up an impressive list of conquests during his swinging bachelor days in the 1990s, but he appears to have achieved the impossible and kept their friendship and respect.

He’s a uniter, not a divider.

NOTHING WRONG WITH A LITTLE NEPOTISM, as long as you keep it in the family: “Ohio’s chief law enforcer was caught on tape cursing a reporter outside a fundraiser for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama because of an article about a woman Dann raised as his daughter landing a state job. Attorney General Marc Dann, a Youngstown Democrat, was headed into the fundraiser Wednesday when he spotted Warren Tribune Chronicle reporter Steve Oravecz and shouted, ‘Hey Steve, write this down: Go (expletive) yourself’!”

But it produced a YouTube moment: “Television station WYTV caught the swearing on camera and posted it online.” If you’re going to practice old-style politics, you still need to be hip to the new-style media.

MICHAEL TOTTEN: “Arab governments are finally taking notice that the Islamist radicals they have been tolerating, appeasing – and sometimes even nurturing – are clear and present dangers to them. Their winking and subtle support for Israel during last summer’s war with Hezbollah may have been explainable by the Sunni-Shia conflict, but their sudden fear and loathing of Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, cannot be.”

THOUGHTS ON CUSTOMER SERVICE: Everyone with a business should read them.

By the way, the Insta-Wife managed to talk to someone at Comcast who had both a brain and the authority to fix things, and our problem was taken care of. But I agree, stuff like this shouldn’t be hard.

HEH:

The founder of an antiviolence group called No Guns pleaded not guilty Thursday to federal weapons charges.

Hector “Big Weasel” Marroquin is accused of selling an assault rifle, a machine gun, two pistols and two silencers to undercover federal agents last fall. He could face up to 50 years in prison if convicted.

Marroquin, 51, of Downey, is a onetime member of the 18th Street gang who founded No Guns in 1996. No Guns received $1.5 million from the city as a subcontractor on anti-gang efforts, but its contract was canceled last year.

Marroquin is charged with three counts of manufacture, distribution and transport for sale of an unlawful assault weapon, along with one count each of machine gun conversion and possession of a silencer.

Via Mark Steyn, who comments: “I love America! Even the anti-gun groups are full of gun nuts packing totally awesome heat.”

EVERY MAN A SHRUM: A YouTube campaign from Mickey Kaus.

TIM RUTTEN ON SILENCE IN THE FACE OF THREATS against Salman Rushdie:

If you’re wondering why you haven’t been able to follow all the columns and editorials in the American press denouncing all this homicidal nonsense, it’s because there haven’t been any. And, in that great silence, is a great scandal.

Is there something beyond the solidarity of the decent that ought to have impelled every commentator and editorial page in the U.S. to express unequivocal support for Sir Salman this week?

Yes. . . . Equally to the point, what is the societal cost of silence among those who have not simply the moral obligation but also the ability to speak — like American commentators and editorial writers?

What masquerades as tolerance and cultural sensitivity among many U.S. journalists is really a kind of soft bigotry, an unspoken assumption that Muslim societies will naturally repress great writers and murder honest journalists, and that to insist otherwise is somehow intolerant or insensitive.

Lost in the self-righteous haze that masks this expedient sentiment is a critical point once made by the late American philosopher Richard Rorty, who was fond of pointing out that “some ideas, like some people, are just no damn good” and that no amount of faux tolerance or misplaced fellow feeling excuses the rest of us from our obligation to oppose such ideas and such people.

If Western and, particularly American, commentators refuse to speak up when their obligations are so clear, the fanatics will win and the terrible silence they so fervently desire will descend over vast stretches of our world — a silence in which the only permissible sounds are the prayers of the killers and the cries of their victims.

Read the whole thing. Frankly, I think the best argument for electing a Democrat as President is that as long as a Republican is in office the media powers-that-be will refuse to condemn even the worst atrocities on the part of Islamists, for fear of helping the real enemy in the White House . . . . (Via Joe Schmo).

MORE ON WHY ETHANOL FUEL is probably a bad idea:

Congress evidently believes that American energy independence depends, in part, on turning massive quantities of food into fuel. The energy bill being debated in the Senate would mandate that 36 billion gallons of ethanol be produced for transport fuel by 2020. President Bush is more or less on board since he proposed a 35 billion gallon mandate in his last State of the Union speech. This is on top of the 2005 requirement that 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol be produced by 2012. Almost one-third of the U.S. corn crop will be used to produce ethanol in 2012.

Some energy hawks might argue that breaking our dependence on foreign oil is worth higher food prices. After all, on average Americans spend about 10 percent of their incomes on groceries. Doubling that would bring us back to the good old days of the 1950s when families spent about 20 percent of their incomes on food. Doubled food prices would not mean mass starvation for Americans. However, our biofuels frenzy will not only starve oil despots of cash, but it could end up literally starving millions in poor countries.

As far as I can tell, food-based ethanol is just liquid pork. Nonetheless, the idea will probably get traction, because: “the world’s poor do not participate in Iowa’s presidential caucuses.”

DICK CHENEY AS A LEGISLATIVE OFFICIAL: Ed Morrissey is not impressed with this gem of a legal argument. He’s right not to be, and he’s right that this is a political and legal embarrassment for the Administration, but it’s not because of the constitutional language he quotes.

The argument that the Vice President is a legislative official isn’t inherently absurd. The Constitution gives the Vice President no executive powers: The VP’s only duties are to preside over the Senate, and to become President if the serving President dies or leaves office. The Vice President really isn’t an Executive official, and isn’t part of the President’s administration the way that other officials are — for one thing, the VP can’t be fired by the President: As an independently elected officeholder, he can be removed only by Congress, via impeachment. (In various separation of powers cases, the Supreme Court has placed a lot of weight on this who-can-fire-you test).

And traditionally VP’s haven’t done much. That changed when Jimmy Carter gave Fritz Mondale an unusual amount of responsibility by historical standards, and has continued with subsequent Administrations, particularly under Clinton/Gore and Bush/Cheney.

But here’s the thing: Whatever executive power a VP exercises is exercised because it’s delegated by the President, not because the VP has it already. So to the extent the President delegates actual power (as opposed to just taking recommendations for action) the VP is exercising executive authority delegated by the President, but unlike everyone else who does so he/she isn’t subject to removal from office by the President (though the President could always withdraw the delegation, of course). However — and here’s where the claim that Cheney is really a legislative official creates problems for the White House — it seems pretty clear that the President isn’t allowed to delegate executive power to a legislative official, as that would be a separation of powers violation. So to the extent that this is what’s going on, the “Cheney is a legislative official” argument is one that opens a big can of worms.

None of this is to say that the President can’t, in his own capacity, decide to apply different rules to the VP (who, after all, is an elected official, unlike cabinet secretaries, NSC staffers, and the like) if he chooses. But that’s a different issue entirely from the “legislative official” angle. Like a lot of the Bush Administration’s arguments, this is one that would make an interesting law school paper topic, or law review article, but that is politically idiotic and legally self-defeating. It’s reminiscent, as one of Capt. Ed’s commenters notes, of the Clinton Administration’s effort to stall Paula Jones’ lawsuit by claiming that as Commander-in-Chief the President is a serving member of the military. Clever, in a way. But definitely not smart.

UPDATE: Mike Rapaport says that I’m wrong. Sort of. “Glenn’s argument is more far reaching than one might at first think. If he is right, then Presidents cannot delegate power to VPs, but they appear to have done this regularly in the last generation. It would make this modern practice unconstitutional. Of course, this is not an argument against Glenn’s reading — lots of modern practices are unconstitutional. But it would be significant.”

Meanwhile, some excellent snark from Orin Kerr: “Today’s Washington Post kicks off a series on Senate President Dick Cheney, who apparently has also exercised some influence in recent years within the Executive Branch.”