FIGHT GLOBAL WARMING by raising speed limits! “So it’s less polluting to drive than fly, right? And it appears that is is rapidly becoming just as quick to drive as fly on not only short-range flights, but increasingly on medium-range flights as well. . . So, since even SUVs are many times less polluting than jet liners, especially of carbon dioxide, then would it not make sense for the global warming alarmists to lobby for raising interstate speed limits to make driving more attractive than flying for many trips?”

FROM THE PAUL GILSTER BOOK I MENTIONED YESTERDAY, a disturbing passage:

“If a test pilot crashes at Edwards Air Force Base,” muses Landis, “they name a street after him, and the next day someone else flies another mission to see what went wrong. With space, things are different. Every mission has to be a success; we can tolerate no casualties. It may be a cultural thing. Maybe we’ve grown too afraid of risks.”

Yes, I think that they’re more cautious even at Edwards these days. But the point holds.

ILYA SHAPIRO: Why I have come to Iraq.

ROGER SIMON: “I had never heard of Captain Jon Soltz before I saw him respond so dramatically to Sgt. David Aguina in front of Andrew Marcus’ pitiless video camera. Soltz leapt to his feet in high dudgeon to threaten the earnest and somewhat naïve Aguina . . . . Soltz’s reaction was clearly out of control. He took poor, confused Aguina aside, scolding him like an errant child while glaring at the camera like a movie star whose privacy had been invaded. Anyone with the slightest media savvy (or human sophistication for that matter) would have realized a polite pat on the head to Aguina and the sergeant would have vanished into the anonymity from whence he came after a few bland words. (Instead, his visage wound up on Drudge, like Mr. Smith come to a virtual Washington.) Something had turned Soltz into an irrational bully.”

Simon has some thoughts on just what did that: “The answer, I think, is that politics in our society has become increasingly identified with the self.”

JOHN FUND SAYS THAT CONGRESS NEEDS AN INTERVENTION:

The House of Representatives almost turned into the Fight Club Thursday night, when Democrats ruled that a GOP motion had failed even though, when the gavel fell, the electronic score board showed it winning 215-213 along with the word FINAL. The presiding officer, Rep. Mike McNulty (D., N.Y.), actually spoke over the clerk who was trying to announce the result.

In the ensuing confusion several members changed their votes and the GOP measure to deny illegal aliens benefits such as food stamps then trailed 212-216. Boiling-mad Republicans stormed off the floor. The next day, their fury increased when they learned electronic records of the vote had disappeared from the House’s voting system.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi made matters worse when she told reporters, “There was no mistake made last night.” Majority Leader Steny Hoyer had to rescue her by acknowledging that, while he thought no wrongdoing had occurred, the minority party was “understandably angry.” Under pressure, the House unanimously agreed to create a select committee, with subpoena powers, to investigate Republican charges the vote had been “stolen.”

Congress appears to be gripped by a partisanship that borders on tribal warfare. In a forthcoming book, Los Angeles Times columnist Ron Brownstein compares it to a “second Civil War” that has led to “the virtual collapse of meaningful collaboration” between the two parties.

Read the whole thing. Yes, I thought things couldn’t get worse, but I was wrong. And note this passage:

Mr. Foley also made a very prescient warning. He urged his fellow Democrats not to exact retribution or respond in kind to heavy-handed GOP tactics should they win back control that November, as they ended up doing: “Democrats [should] clearly and intensely [promise] that if they take the majority back again, they will not go back and try to pay back, so to speak, what they felt were the excesses and even the outrages of this period, but will promise minority rights in reaching those minority decisions.”

Clearly, his fellow Democrats in the House haven’t been following his advice. Maybe they ought to appoint Messrs. Foley and Gingrich to head an outside task force to recommend ways to make the House work again. If the House had the sense to recognize it had to appoint a select committee to investigate last Friday’s vote fiasco, it should see the possible benefits of having an outside group weigh in on its dysfunctional ways.

Foley’s advice is made more poignant because it was his action in holding the vote open past the deadline to manage passage of the assault weapons ban that cost him his seat in Congress, and the Democrats their majority last time around.

UPDATE: Reader Rick Lang emails: “And the US Congress has the audacity to say the war is lost because the IRAQI Parliament is non-functional. . . .”

BLOGGING FROM A 737.

THE EXAMINER ON SPEED CAMERAS:

There are, for example, legitimate questions about whether speed cameras actually reduce the number of people killed and injured on area streets, and whether there are more cost-efficient ways of achieving the same or better results. There also is a major concern about whether speed cameras will ultimately function more as revenue-raising devices than effective tools for increasing road safety. Too little attention has been devoted to these and other issues in the region’s public discussion on speed cameras.

By way of preliminary analysis, there is a paucity of credible data on the effectiveness of speed cameras in reducing traffic fatalities and injuries. In 2005, British researchers Paul Pilkington and Sanjay Kindra assessed 92 studies worldwide that claimed to provide credible data, but rejected all but 14 of them. Even among the 14 that met minimal standard criteria for methodological soundness, Pilkington and Kindra concluded: “Research conducted so far consistently shows that speed cameras are an effective intervention in reducing road traffic collisions and related casualties. The level of evidence is relatively poor, however, as most studies did not have satisfactory comparison groups or adequate control for potential confounders.”

It’s all about the revenue. If the money went to the state’s general fund instead of the municipalities involved, nobody would be rolling these out.

HARRY MCCRACKEN: I went undercover with Dateline, too.

WORKING-CLASS MILLIONAIRES, in Silicon Valley. You find a lot of those on Wall Street and in big law firms, too.

AN UPDATED VERSION of Daniel Solove’s census of law professor bloggers.