FROM REUTERS, OF ALL PLACES, THIS SEEMS LIKE GOOD NEWS:

A row of beds lies empty in the emergency ward of Baghdad’s Yarmouk Hospital. The morgue, which once overflowed with corpses, is barely a quarter full.

Doctors at the hospital, a barometer of bloodshed in the Iraqi capital, say there has been a sharp fall in victims of violence admitted during a seven-month security campaign.

Last month the fall was particularly dramatic, with 70 percent fewer bodies and half the number of wounded brought in compared to July, hospital director Haqi Ismail said.

Via Captain Ed, who has more thoughts and observes: “Oddly, this did not get much play in the American media yesterday.”

UPDATE: Related thoughts here.

“SHE HSU’D HAVE KNOWN BETTER”: “Hillary Clinton claims ignorance over Norman Hsu’s dirty money. But she was right in the middle of a nearly identical fundraising scandal a decade ago. In fact, she was briefed about the prior scandal by an aide who’s advising her today.”

THEY TOLD ME THAT IF GEORGE W. BUSH WERE REELECTED, those who spoke out to authority would be taken down by its minions. And they were right!

UPDATE: Seared in memory.

MORE: Dean Barnett looks at the big picture. And it’s not pretty.

DAVID HARSANYI’S NEW BOOK, Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and other Boneheaded Bureaucrats are Turning America into a Nation of Children, is out.

CRASH-TEST YOUR CAR: Here.

BILL ARDOLINO POSTS random pictures from Fallujah.

IN THE MAIL: William Bonner & Lila Rajiva’s Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics. It’s blurbed by Ron Paul, among others.

GREYHAWK: “Got an email picture of my wife with another guy today. It was President Bush. . . . President Bush and I have something else in common – we both chatted with Bill Roggio over the weekend. I picked up Bill from MND-C headquarters and took him off for a GI tour of Camp Victory.”

RENT A CONGRESSMAN: “Your return on your investment can be as high as $75 for every dollar invested.”

THOUGHTS ON the misquotation of Alan Greenspan. It’s as if the press has an agenda that overrides its devotion to accurate reporting: “Greenspan claims that the quote was taken out of context. Greenspan called the Post — Bob Woodward, no less — to say that, in fact, he didn’t think the White House was motivated by oil. Rather, he was. A Post story Monday explained that Greenspan had long favored Saddam Hussein’s ouster because the Iraqi dictator was a threat to the Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s oil passes every day.”

BLOGWARS! Personally, I suspect that Hamsher is loving the attention.

JEFF JARVIS: “Yahoo’s a mess. Well, we already knew that.”

DALLAS MORNING NEWS: ” Amid the mountain of evidence released in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial, the most provocative has turned out to be a handful of previously classified evidence detailing Islamist extremists’ ambitious plans for a U.S. takeover.”

SPACE SOLAR POWER gets a boost: “After spending weeks in information-gathering mode, a Pentagon analyst says the idea of putting satellites in orbit to harvest solar power and beam it down to Earth has lots of merit – and a test of the concept could be set in motion by 2015.”

OUCH: “First Pat Summitt, now Bruce Pearl. If success in UT athletics means marital problems, Phil Fulmer has nothing to worry about.”

DEMO-PALOOZA: A report from the Iowa Steak Fry.

HELL IS OVER: Michael Totten posts another report from Anbar. Read the whole thing. And remember that he’s supported by reader donations, so if you like his reporting consider hitting the tipjar.

CALIFORNIA GREENHOUSE SUIT DISMISSED: “The courts do not have the authority or the expertise to decide injury lawsuits concerning global warming, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled yesterday in dismissing a suit brought by the State of California against six car companies.”

MORE ON THE CHEMERINSKY FIRING-REHIRING, from Matt Welch: “The climate for free speech will remain chilled, and the political atmosphere poisonous, for as long as we don’t know why the UC Irvine leader unhired Erwin Chemerinsky in the first place.”

Brendan Loy takes a different tack: “Cool. Now Chemerinsky needs to do something really outrageous, so he can get himself re-fired. C’mon Erwin, you know you want to be the Billy Martin of academia!”

And here’s more on the Larry Summers story, from the San Jose Mercury-News: UC Regents accused of squashing academic debate. And the Boston Globe sniffs: “Summers’s ho-hum replacement? Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s chief of staff, Susan Kennedy.”

BILL ROGGIO looks at a surge in southern Baghdad.

Meanwhile, Omar Fadhil looks at Iraqi politics.

IT’S WEIMAR-LEVEL: Inflation hits Germany.

FANTASY FOOTBALL MEETS POLITICS, at the National Journal’s new political stock exchange.

THE TRIAL OF Oscar Wyatt.

PRAISE FOR JOHN ONDRASIK. Our podcast interview with him is here.