MEGAN MCARDLE: “City dwellers are far too self-satisfied with their allegedly low-carbon lifestyle, too willing to impose carbon taxes in the belief it won’t affect them much. It is especially irritating to hear people who take multiple annual long-haul flights complain about SUV drivers, but the general phenomenon is broader than that.”

BOB LEVY: Mukasey should declare where he stands on Second Amendment. Indeed.

ENDING THE FOOD FIGHT: What to do about fat kids.

JOE BIDEN: A UNITER, NOT A DIVIDER! Iraqi politicians come together to condemn Biden proposal on splitting up Iraq.

SPUTNIK WEEK: It’s Rand Simberg vs. Homer Hickam on NASA and space, in the Los Angeles Times.

MY GRANDFATHER’S SON came yesterday, but I didn’t get to read it as the Insta-Wife immediately snatched it away. However, she reports that so far it’s a “fantastic book.”

UPDATE: I haven’t gotten to read it, but Ann Althouse is blogging the book.

MORE: Clarence Thomas on Ayn Rand.

BUSH/CLINTON/BUSH/CLINTON: “The dominance of the two families in U.S. presidential politics is unprecedented.” Brendan Loy comments: “Count me among the 25 percent of Americans who say that anti-dynasty sentiment will be a factor in their 2008 voting decision. . . . This dynastic trend clearly isn’t healthy for democracy. It’s one of several unhealthy trends at the moment, in fact (the public’s extremely low confidence in the political class and extremely high confidence in the military being another).”

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY:

Ever since the Sept. 10 testimony of Gen. David Petraeus, we’ve heard less and less from the mainstream media about the war in Iraq. The old adage “no news is good news” has never been truer. That the media are no longer much interested in Iraq is a sure sign things are going well there. Instead, they’re talking about the presidential campaign, or Burma, or global warming, or . . . whatever.

Why? Simply put, the news from Iraq has been quite positive.

Read the whole thing.

RICHARD MINITER: My dinner with Clarence Thomas.

HARRY REID trips over his own rhetoric on the war.

MICKEY KAUS: “Ron Burkle can buy all the tabs in the world, but he can’t buy the Web.”

MEDIA BATTLESPACE PREPARATION: More thoughts from Jon Henke.

STUART TAYLOR looks at free speech and double standards on campus. Excerpt:

The silencing of Summers was easy to miss. The Washington Post did not report it. The New York Times gave it three sentences. The Los Angeles Times ignored it, except for one nonstaff op-ed.

By contrast, the briefly martyred Chemerinsky — who was hired, fired (based on conservative complaints about his political views), and rehired (thanks in part to free-speech conservative support) as founding dean of a new law school at UC Irvine — inspired 17 articles and editorials in the Los Angeles Times, two articles and an outraged editorial in The New York Times, and one article in The Washington Post.

The notion that Summers stands for “gender” — let alone “racial” — prejudice is a fantasy espoused by loopy radicals and people ignorant of what he actually said about women and certain sciences. (For more, see my 2/5/05 and 2/26/05 NJ columns.) But loopy radicals dominate political discourse on many a campus, and they despise intellectual diversity.

These episodes, and enough others to fill volumes, expose the double standard that many academics and journalists apply to free-speech controversies. Such people passionately champion the freedoms of liberals such as Chemerinsky and “dialogue” with America-haters such as Ahmadinejad. But they downplay, ignore, and in some cases support censorship of conservative and even centrist speakers.

Read the whole thing.

MARC AMBINDER ON the Republican money race.:

Giuliani and Romney will have enough money to compete through Feb. 5. Thompson has enough to run fully-fledged campaigns in the early states. Romney can write himself a check whenever he wants. The rest of the field is on fumes, money-wise.

And Republicans are raising much less than the Democrats.

That last should worry them.

HSUBRIS:

With an endorsement of sorts from George Bush, Hillary has now rounded up about all the big names and moneybags in Washington politics. The President predicts she will get the Democratic nomination, and everything seems to be going her way. Never has the adjective “golden” found a more apposite noun to modify than “Ms. Clinton.” . . .

Both of the Clintons seem to have gone money-crazy. Bill is out loose on the world taking enormous amounts of money from anyone who pays him to appear anywhere and bragging about it. With a pension of $186,000 a year plus innumerable other perks, another ex-President might rein in the itchy palm urge, but Bill is not known as a self-control artist. Whether he is also acting as a bag man for his wife is something for future grand juries to investigate.

Interestingly, these slams are in The Nation. Plus, more criticism from Joe Trippi.

More on Trippi here:

From the sound of what senior adviser Joe Trippi and deputy campaign manager Jonathan Prince had to say, the campaign is moving in a direction of intensifying its anti-Washington argument as a way of trying to draw sharper distinctions between John Edwards and Hillary Clinton, taking advantage of the recent Norman Hsu fundraising scandal and Clinton’s defense of lobbyists to portray her as part of “the corroded busted rigged system of Washington,” as Trippi described it.

“We don’t believe the Clinton campaign has a deep and abiding interest in having this election framed around money,” he said.

Well, it depends on what you mean by “framed around money,” I guess.

A BIG BURMA ROUNDUP at Pajamas Media. Alas, it’s pretty much all bad news.

WHAT TO DO WITH leftover marinara sauce.

THE TITANIC truth movement. Don’t miss the video, complete with scientific proof that ice can’t break steel!

FROM ROB PORT, praise for Hillary’s baby-bond idea.

RON PAUL: CAN YOU STILL CALL HIM A MINOR CANDIDATE? “The antiwar libertarian raised more than $3 million in the third quarter, up from $2.4 million in the second quarter and $641,000 in the first three months of the year. For the three months ended Sept. 30, Paul out-raised old Washington hands including Democrats Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, who took in $1.5 million, and Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, who raised just under $2 million.”

AL QAEDA: Unhappy in Iraq.

UPDATE: TigerHawk notes: “As of this writing, it is hard to find a major American newspaper that has picked up news of the ‘desperation’ letter, but Al-Jazz and the Tehran Times are all over it. Of course, they probably do not care if the Democrats win next year.”

THE DOW-JONES HITS a new record.

UPDATE: Well, I said I’m usually wrong about these things. Alternative argument: It all depends on what the meaning of “a while is.” Apparently, “a while” means “less than two months!” But I actually don’t expect a lot more upside here. Which means . . . not much. If you’re coming to InstaPundit for investment advice, well . . . you obviously haven’t been watching my portfolio.

FAKE WAR HERO COMPLAINS about “fake soldiers” remark. Michelle Malkin notes a Tom Harkin blast from the past.

Really, you can’t make this stuff up. Er, unless you’re Tom Harkin. I noted back in 2004, the last time Harkin made this an issue, that the press was giving him a pass. Will it do so again? And why are the Democrats letting Harkin, of all people, get out front on this issue?

UPDATE: A military reader emails:

Yet another example of some folks who just need to get out more. While I can speak specifically for only myself, as a general rule, real soldiers can’t stand soldiers who lie about their records. That the Democrats are willing to take the cause of fake soldiers to the Senate floor may please MoveOn.org, but it certainly won’t endear Harkin, et al, to the troops.

I don’t think they’re expecting many votes from that quarter anyway.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Heh.

JUSTICE FOR the Internet.

CHINA’S NEW PROPERTY LAW WENT INTO EFFECT TODAY: Greg Stein takes a look.