A DIMINISHED New York Times.

Plus, will the New York Post go national?

FROM JANE FONDA TO DR. STRANGELOVE IN ONE WEEK.

Actually, regardless of what you think of Obama’s comments on substance, I think they’re beneficial. They make other countries worry that maybe waiting to get a better deal from the Democrats isn’t a sure thing, and that in fact they might have to deal with a Democratic President who’s . . . a bit scary. That can only help negotiations progress now.

UPDATE: Pakistanis are burning American flags in response to Obama’s remarks. Gateway Pundit has a roundup.

MORE: Barack Obama, neocon: “At least he’s willing to use force against something.”

IN RESPONSE TO MY EARLIER POST ON INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL, Frank Tipler emails:

In section N of the Appendix for Scientists in my book THE PHYSICS OF IMMORTALITY, entitled “Relativistic Spacecraft,” I point out that, in effect, those books you reference on interstellar travel were obsolete before they were written.

Human will NEVER engage in interstellar travel. Only human downloads and artificial intelligences. Carrying full size human bodies, active or frozen, is too inefficient.

In my more recent book, THE PHYSICS OF CHRISTIANITY, Chapter 11, I discuss the ultimate interstellar drive, the neutrino rocket powered by a Standard Model process that allows ordinary matter to be transformed into radiation like neutrinos. Think of the DeLorean car at the end of the movie Back to the Future. This is what this technology will look like. Power is supplied by converting garbage into energy and the propulsion system is a rocket exhaust that has no effect on the surroundings.

I point out in Chapter 11 of the latest book that we’ll have both the human download technology and the neutrino rocket within 50 years. You should not teach your students the the future will be based on obsolete physics.

Sounds more like Greg Egan’s Diaspora. But I’ll be sure to let my students know — and they’ll be amused to see that I’ve been chided for lack of imagination by a physicist of Tipler’s eminence.

DAN RIEHL HAS BEEN FOLLOWING THE TWISTS AND TURNS of the Goose Creek arrests. And there have been some twists and turns.

UPDATE: Frank J. is angry: “I call profiling! We the blogosphere need to investigate this and find out which police officers were involved and hold them accountable.” But he sees an upside: “With the luck we’ve had in America of avoiding terrorist attacks, I guess by Pat Robertson’s view no one has done anything gay enough to make God angry since 2001.”

ORIN KERR on the new FISA amendment.

Some people are unhappy with the bill’s Democratic supporters.

UPDATE: More on the Democrats here. “When push comes to shove, especially on war-related issues, the Democrats have failed almost every time to fulfill their campaign promises. The FISA legislation should enrage the Democratic base. . . . The new majority has proven a little too difficult to manage, especially for Nancy Pelosi. The Blue Dogs have actually made the party less reliably Leftist.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jack Balkin: “The passage of the new FISA bill by the Senate and now the House demonstrates that the Democrats stand neither for defending civil liberties nor for checking executive power. They stand for nothing at all. . . . I hope the Democrats are justly proud of themselves for their cowardly contributions to this slow-motion destruction of our constitutional system.” I guess they’re enraged, all right.

MORE: Tom Maguire comments:

Let me add my own twist – while Dems were busy playing up to the Kos Kidz in Chicago, back in Washington the House Dems were collapsing before the imagined wrath of George Bush on the new legislation modifying FISA (described by Orin Kerr).

Was Nancy Pelosi really that concerned that Bush would rally the full force of the 29% who still approve of the job he is doing? Maybe!

But I’ll bet she was worried that Rush Limbaugh and the right wing talk machine would have chewed on Democrats about this issue all through the August recess – immigration is over, so what were they going to rant about?

Shouldn’t she also have been worried about being chewed on by the “netroots” if she cravenly gave in to Bush? Evidently, she was more worried about Rush – go figure.

Who has a bigger audience?

RICK MORAN INTERVIEWS DAVID AGUINA, the soldier who was silenced at YearlyKos yesterday.

UPDATE: More on Aguina here.

“I WENT HOME AT NIGHT IN TEARS. It was awful.”

SCOOPS OF THE CENTURY!

The LAT discovers that Matt Drudge has become a favorite conduit for the mainstream media and has a man in Los Angeles who created a side business by pointing Drudge Report links his way. Next up: Times hears Bush may go to war against Saddam Hussein.

Plus, Fred Thompson’s wife is an attractive blonde! And a lobbyist! Money quote: “A smart, good-looking woman in Washington in her 30s dating a member of Congress doesn’t come as a shocker.” You think?

UPDATE: From covering the obvious to ignoring it.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT: Mark Steyn on how rich Saudis are using lawsuits to crush reports of Saudi support for terror.

JACK LAIL SEEMS TO HAVE IDENTIFIED A KEY ASPECT TO ONLINE SUCCESS:

The most successful online publications – whether old or new media, whether video or text – all have a lean, mean operation that employs the best people, gives them creative freedom to shape their publication, and frees them from the constraints of the traditional publishing environment and of what has gone before.

Old Media have trouble adapting to this because of internal power dynamics.

FREE SPEECH ON CAMPUS IS FINE, but some institutions are too sacred to criticize.

EARTH-FRIENDLY GEOTHERMAL ENERGY:

“The glass vases on the shelf rattled, and there was a loud bang,” Catherine Wueest, a teashop owner, recalls. “I thought a truck had crashed into the building.”

But the 3.4 magnitude tremor on the evening of Dec. 8 was no ordinary act of nature: It had been accidentally triggered by engineers drilling deep into the Earth’s crust to tap its inner heat and thus break new ground — literally — in the world’s search for new sources of energy. . . .

In Basel, the first shaft was bored last year by a 190-foot-tall drilling rig towering above nearby apartment buildings. Water was pumped down the injection well in the test phase in December, and as expected, it heated to above 390 F as it seeped through the layers of rock below.

But that’s where the water remains for the time being; it caused the rock layers to slip, causing the tremors and rumbles that spooked the townspeople.

Geopower Basel, had forecast some rock slippage. In fact, it said the location on top of a fault line — the upper Rhine trench — was an advantage because it meant the heat was closer to the Earth’s surface.

Oops.

HERE’S MORE ON NBC’S undercover hacker humiliation.

Dateline NBC associate producer Michelle Madigan was heckled and derided as she ran from DefCon, the world’s largest computer hackers conference, and raced away in a car. . . . “They sent a moderately attractive young lady with a purse cam whose mission was to first capture someone on film admitting to a felony, which is really not cool, and second to catch a fed on film,” said DefCon spokesman “Priest.” . . . Madigan’s flight was followed by hackers and reporting peers openly disapproving her methods.

Not ready for primetime.

I’M NOW READING PAUL GILSTER’S Centauri Dreams: Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration. I’m thinking of taking my Space Law seminar a bit further afield than usual, with stuff like this, An Introduction to Planetary Defense, and maybe Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience. Any other suggestions?

CHARLES JOHNSON ON AIRBRUSHING AT DAILYKOS: “Imagine, if you will, the reaction among LGF’s admirers on the left if I started deleting topics and comments wholesale.”

UPDATE: Apparently the airbrushing was by the diarist himself, in response to criticism from fellow Kossacks.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: MCCAIN RAPS CONGRESS FOR BRIDGE COLLAPSE:

Republican John McCain said Saturday that Congress could share in the blame for the Minnesota bridge collapse because lawmakers diverted billions of dollars in transportation money from road work to pet projects. . . .

“We spent approximately $20 billion of that money on pork barrel, earmark projects,” said McCain. “Maybe if we had done it right, maybe some of that money would have gone to inspect those bridges and other bridges around the country. Maybe the 200,000 people who cross that bridge every day would have been safer than spending $233 million of your tax dollars on a bridge in Alaska to an island with 50 people on it.”

McCain spoke during a town hall-style meeting with activists, saying he was angered not just by Congress wasting money on special projects, but also by it approving reform packages he labeled a sham.

“I’m angry today because we just had a chance to reform this process in Washington and we punted,” said McCain. “We pushed off on the American people a joke and a sham in the name of earmark reform.”

Actually blaming Congress for this particular tragedy is a bit hyperbolic. But we have big infrastructure needs, and we’re spending money on other stuff — and members would rather have their name on something shiny and new than on unglamorous repairs. So in terms of distorted priorities, he’s got a point.

UPDATE: Reader Gregory Hill emails:

Hyperbolic? Yes. But this may just be the shot-in-the-arm that his campaign needs. This can help re-establish his creds as the ‘town maverick’. It allows him to play the ‘us vs them’ game, with them being an incredibly corrupt Congress. He’s got plenty of material to work with and nothing to lose….

If I were his campaign advisor, I’d tell him to play this for all it’s worth. Me, I’m in the Giuliani camp. But McCain declaring open season on Congress would be a good thing for everyone!

True enough.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ed Morrissey says McCain is wrong. “Just as I criticized Amy Klobuchar and James Oberstar for exploiting the tragedy for their political hobby horses, we need to ask Senator McCain to have a care how he uses the dead in our community. I fully support his efforts to end earmarks and push towards legislative reform, but let’s stick to the real consequences of earmark abuse.”

THOSE CURSED ZIONISTS: Always making Arabs do terrible things. They’re so omnipotent, it’s a wonder the Saudis haven’t given up and converted to Judaism.

A POSSIBLY INTERESTING ARREST in South Carolina: “Gentlemen of ‘Middle Eastern descent’ out on a Saturday night with a carload of ‘explosive devices’ when pulled over in Goose Creek, S.C., home to the Naval Weapons Station and U.S. Naval Consolidated Brig, home to enemy combatants.” Of course, this may turn out to be nothing. Stay tuned.

ANN ALTHOUSE STEPS IN WHERE Hillary fears to tread: “I call myself a liberal, which is — ironically — something she won’t do.”

RUPERT MURDOCH: “I won’t meddle any more than Arthur Sulzberger does.”

ROMNEY: I’m not running for pastor-in-chief.

YOU DON’T TUG ON SUPERMAN’S CAPE, and you don’t spy on hackers unless you’re, you know, actually good at it:

The DefCon security conference is buzzing after an undercover NBC-Universal reporter fled the building after being publicly exposed for using a spy camera to film attendees.

DefCon organizer Jeff Moss called out Michelle Madigan, an Associate Producer for NBC-Universal, from stage during the “Tactical Exploitation” session.

Shades of NBC’s lame undercover NASCAR trolling.

CONGRESSIONAL pork rinds.

WHEN FAILURE TO POLICE YOURSELF AGAINST CRIMES YOU HAVEN’T COMMITTED becomes a crime.

UPDATE: From the comments: “I used to donate to MADD. That was before they became a branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.”

Yeah, they’re even complaining about booze on trains. No drivers there.

YOU’D THINK: “When a member of the journalism community is murdered, wouldn’t you expect most news agencies to report it?”

UPDATE: More here.