BORN ON THE BAYOU: Novels by Kimberly Willis Holt.

BILL HOBBS: “Michael Silence, the reporter/blogger at the Knoxville News Sentinel is running rings around the The Tennessean’s political reporters and their blog on the Fred Thompson story. “

BILL ARDOLINO INTERVIEWS a civil affairs Marine in Fallujah.

IMUS VS. SCHUMER on Walter Reed: Follow the link and see the transcript.

IAN HALPERIN’S JAMES TAYLOR BIOGRAPHY, Fire and Rain, gets a review from Doug Weinstein.

PROTESTING AGAINST ZAPATERO IN MADRID, to the tune of over 2 million people, according to reports collected at BarcePundit. It’s a lot of protesters, anyway.

THE APPLE-THEMED ANTI-HILLARY VIDEO that people were talking about last week is still of uncertain authorship. But it’s been viewed over 100,000 times because — as one of the commenters notes — it’s funny.

On the other hand, Andrew Marcus’s video from the Secular Islam conference has been viewed over 100,000 times, too, without the aid of humor. That’s actually kind of encouraging.

UPDATE: By the way, Andrew Marcus emails to say that he shot that video with this Canon still camera. When I first met Andrew, he was shooting a documentary in HD with, literally, a truckload of equipment and a crew. Not that that stuff doesn’t have its place, but he’s really been won over by the ease, flexibility, and surprisingly high quality of shooting web video with digital still cameras. And, as he noted in this email, people are far less intimidated by the smaller camera, which tends to produce better interviews.

AN ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTER is noted by Tim Blair.

THOUGHTS ON PROSECUTORIAL ETHICS, from Maimon Schwarzschild.

THE GREENHOUSE-FRIENDLY NUCLEAR OPTION IN EUROPE:

The role of nuclear power in Europe received an unexpected boost yesterday as EU leaders hailed a landmark climate change deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and switch to renewable fuels.

Environmentalists complained that an ambitious headline goal to cut Europe’s CO emissions by a fifth by 2020 had been weakened by concessions to the main nuclear nations and the biggest polluters in Eastern Europe. . . . Jacques Chirac, the outgoing French President, welcomed the deal as one of the top three achievements of the EU during his 12 years in the Elysée Palace.

Tony Blair was also pleased with the concession towards the nuclear powers. The outcome will give a boost to his plans to rebuild Britain’s ageing nuclear power stations which suffered a setback last month when the High Court ruled that the consultation process was seriously flawed. Mr Blair said: “There is then the 20 per cent target on renewable energy. In setting that, there will be permission to look at the energy mix that countries have . . . including nuclear technology, which obviously helps the UK as well.”

I think that America should take a “more European” approach to energy policy.

“COMPLETELY SMUGLY, and to the annoyance of my critics.”

DAVE WEIGEL on the D.C. Second Amendment decision: “That’s huge. And one angle you probably won’t hear: This is the direction DC public opinion has been moving toward for some time. “Only one month ago Marion Barry, DC’s statesman/punchline who now holds a city council seat, proposed a halt to the gun ban.”

Plus, Radley Balko notes the Washington Post’s silly, shrill editorial. I should have said, silly, shrill, and predictable. And Jeralyn Merritt comments at TalkLeft.

THE “HARMLESS HABIT” THAT turns men off.

ANN ALTHOUSE AND I appear on BloggingHeadsTV, with a special guest appearance by the Insta-Wife.

HERE’S A LOOK AT THE DIGITAL EFFECTS in the new movie 300. Inspired by the critics’ reviews, Dean Barnett is eager to see the film!

I imagine this will help the sales of Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire, too. That’s good, as I found it to be an excellent novel. So did the whopping 556 reviewers over at Amazon. . . .

UPDATE: I haven’t read Pressfield’s Alexander the Great novel, but people seem to like it, too.

ANOTHER UPDATE: An interesting look at the politics of the film. Apparently it didn’t play well in Berlin. But the National Hockey League likes it! I’d think they’d find it insufficiently violent . . . .

DAVE KOPEL ON THE ART OF “INSULTING UPWARD,” as practiced by Ann Coulter and her disciples.

HMM. CONGO URANIUM RING SMASHED:

Authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo say they have dismantled an international network set up to illegally use uranium mined there.

Scientific Research Minister Sylvanus Mushi said DR Congo’s top nuclear official and a colleague were being questioned in connection with the case.

The official, Fortunat Lumu, and the colleague were arrested on Tuesday.

The move comes amid reports that a large quantity of uranium has gone missing in recent years in DR Congo.

State prosecutor Tshimanga Mukeba earlier told the BBC that an “important quantity” of uranium was taken from the atomic energy centre in the capital, Kinshasa, without revealing any figures.

Hmm. I wonder where it went? Here’s some speculation: “Patricia Feeney, director of a campaigning organisation called Rights and Accountability in Development says action is overdue. The worry is, who is buying in this nuclear black market. There are rumours it could be Iran or North Korea.” Gee, do you think?

IS THE BBC running scared?

MORE ON DEVELOPMENTS AT DUKE, at K.C. Johnson’s blog. Just keep scrolling.

MORE ON THE ONGOING disgrace at San Francisco State University.

MAYBE BUSH SHOULD TRY TO SELL HIS SURVEILLANCE PROGRAMS AS “MORE EUROPEAN:”

Sweden is close to implementing new surveillance legislation that will include the monitoring of emails, telephone calls and keyword searches using advanced pattern analysis. The objective is to detect ‘threats such as terrorism, IT attacks or the spread of weapons of mass destruction’ but the proposals have divided the country. In a misguided attempt to put people at ease, the government admitted that Sweden has been tapping its citizens’ phones for decades anyway.

‘Cause the Europeans are, you know, more progressive than we are.

NOW EUGENE VOLOKH NOTES a Second Amendment error in The Washington Post. It’s like they’re not even trying to get this stuff right.

UPDATE: More problems for the New York Times, too. Maybe if they’d stop just taking dictation from the Brady Campaign or the Violence Policy Center and actually learn about this stuff, they’d do a better job . . . .

JOANNE JACOBS’ BOOK IS NOW out in paperback.

I GUESS SOMEBODY FORGOT TO TELL NEWT: Chris Matthews says that conservatives don’t like sex.

MORE ON BUSH’S BRAZILIAN BIOFUEL PACT: Plus, I think I approve of this loophole:

A tortured route around the tariff goes through the Caribbean Basin. There, two dozen small countries are exempted as part of a 24-year-old trade agreement from near the end of the Cold War, designed to combat communism by feeding the U.S. dollar into their poor economies. Even that tariff exception — which requires entrepreneurs like Mr. White to jump through legal hoops while risking losses from volatility of supply and demand in Brazil and the U.S. — is under attack. . . .

The Caribbean sugar industry is so antiquated that it can’t produce the fuel competitively from its own cane fields. Instead, Caribbean companies take on a middle step in the production process: They dehydrate the ethanol from its original state, then ship it to U.S. refiners, which add gasoline to make the fuel useable in American cars.

The dehydrating meets the U.S. requirement that products be “substantially transformed” in Caribbean Basin countries, if they don’t originate there, to escape tariffs. Such techniques to satisfy trade rules often are controversial: In the 1980s and 1990s, Caribbean Basin countries ran afoul of U.S. apparel makers when they started finishing low-cost apparel from Asia and sending it on to the U.S., skirting trade barriers aimed at the Asian products.

U.S. farm-state lawmakers like Sen. Grassley say that merely siphoning water from ethanol shouldn’t qualify Caribbean firms for tariff breaks. “It’s subterfuge,” he says.

We should get rid of the tariff, which — as Grassley’s state-of-the-union behavior illustrates — is just a subsidy to domestic political interests. More thoughts on that here:

If Mr Bush were serious about ethanol, he’d let Brazil’s in more cheaply, preferably tariff-free. This would boost both Brazilian farmers and America’s ethanol infrastructure. Once all that expensive stuff starts to appear—pumping stations, distribution networks—American cellulosic ethanol (from switchgrass and whatnot) is a lot more likely to come onto the market and be competitive. Everyone wins but OPEC.

And Grassley’s corngrowing constituents.