CONGRATULATIONS TO GATEWAY PUNDIT JIM HOFT. I’m feeling a bit left out.

DON SURBER WONDERS at the Associated Press’s sudden enthusiasm for pork barrel spending. What could account for that?

ERIC SCHEIE: “I’m sick of living in a world in which legal trouble can be generated by robots.”

I’ve had some thoughts on this subject myself.

ANTIWAR PROTESTS FIZZLE. Again.

How do you ask someone to be the last man to march for a mistake?

RICK ELLENSBURG, Internet detective. This cries out for an IowaHawk parody . . . .

UPDATE: More comedy gold.

MORE: Ouch. “Lacking even the ethics of a journalist.”

STILL MORE: Some historical perspective.

MORE STILL: Heh: “So we now are presented with the delightful spectacle of a sockpuppet administered a wedgie by someone denying that he is in fact himself.”

SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL BLOGGER: It’s pledge week at Tim Blair’s place.

THE UNSTOPPABLE COLBERT-FOR-PRESIDENT CANDIDACY: “A million Facebook users have signed up for the ‘1,000,000 Strong for Stephen T Colbert’ group in the last week — though the group could be read as a satire of Barack Obama’s similarly-named group, which has fewer than 400,000 members after 9 months.”

UPDATE: More on Colbert: “I think his goal should not be South Carolina, but to actually participate in two of the debates, one for each party he’s running in. I guarantee they would be the most watched debates ever.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: The Edwards Campaign, running scared, tries to gin up a snack food controversy.

SNUBBED: “The Democratic Party’s convention in Florida during the weekend was like a rock concert performed solely by warm-up bands. . . .. All the leading Democratic presidential candidates followed orders from the Democratic National Committee to boycott the 3-day convention at the Walt Disney World resorts, and public campaigning in the state in general, as punishment for Florida’s move to hold its presidential primary early.”

MARK STEYN EXPLAINS that life is not a movie.

GERALD FORD on Bill and Hillary.

NOW THIS IS A SHOCK:

A high-profile documentary, Sony Pictures Classics’ “Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains,” had a poor debut, taking in just $10,573 at seven theaters. The film from director Jonathan Demme (“The Silence of the Lambs”) follows the former president during a tour to promote his book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.”

Failing to pack theaters for a documentary about Jimmy Carter? How fickle, the public.

MAYBE I SHOULD TRY THIS solution to air-travel woes.

THE RANGEL TAX BILL: Redistributing wealth from the “very rich” to people making between $200,000 and $500,000 a year! “Thus, as a first approximation, the plan increases the progressivity of the tax code by redistributing income from the very rich (e.g., CEOs, hedge fund managers, superstar athletes and actors) to the upper middle class (e.g., doctors, lawyers, congressmen).”

Supporting the people, not the powerful!

ERIC SCHEIE ON THE BUCHANANITES: “They may be right wing fringe, but they’re providing an incalculable service to the left.. . . I wasn’t going to bother with a post, because this is really nothing new for Pat Buchanan. But — now that I’ve seen these characterizations of Little Green Footballs as a ‘pro-Muslim, left-wing blog’, I think a few words are in order.”

DEBT VS. DEFICIT: “The Bush administration and congressional Republicans have spent the past several weeks celebrating the fact that the unified budget deficit for fiscal 2007 ($161 billion) was 1.2 percent of GDP. But that ratio has become increasingly misleading in recent years because the annual increase in the national debt has dwarfed the unified budget deficit and the nominal growth rate of the economy.” Falling deficits are good, but not sufficient. And even during the “surpluses” of the 1990s the national debt continued to grow. It’s not really a surplus unless debt goes down.

UPDATE: Charges of “an elementary analytical error.” Dang. I’d hoped to achieve advanced analytical error.

PEOPLE ARE STILL CIRCULATING THE FAKE CNN STORY blaming MEChA for the California fires, so it’s worth repeating that it’s fake. I agree with the commenter who notes, “this is not The Onion, this is more like those phishing emails that look almost exactly like paypal or ebay.” Yes, it’s not meant to fool you for 5 seconds, it’s meant to fool you, period.

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA on the big screen.

ENVY AND FEAR, in Canada’s heartland.

COMPLAINTS ABOUT THE POLITICIZATION OF JUDICIAL RACES: But couldn’t the term just as easily be “democratization?” Yeah, there’s politics — but there’s plenty of politics in judicial appointments, too. It’s just not out in the open.

A LOOK AT mandatory diversity in Iowa, from John Rosenberg.

MOVING THE GOAL POSTS: The Mudville Gazette notes a grudging accommodation to realities on the ground:

The narrative on Iraq – the one you see in the media, that is – is changing. Claims that “we’ve lost” and that American soldiers have been beaten by opponents who are righteous heroes or nine-foot tall and bullet proof are being quite subtly shifted to arguments that no potential victory (if even grudgingly acknowledged) could be worth the price. This argument may prove irresistible to those who’ve invested heavily in defeat.

But read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Don Surber spots similar lemons-from-lemonade behavior from CBS. “You see, if the enemy turns its swords into plowshares, that’s bad because the enemy will corner the market on plowshares.”

MORE ON EVAN COYNE MALONEY’S NEW FILM, Indoctrinate U.

IN THE MAIL: John Hart’s novel, Down River.

I’M SURPRISED THIS HASN’T COME AROUND BEFORE: A cubicle defense system.

GREG MANKIW ROUNDS UP tax reform proposals.