MORE ON CATHY SEIPP, from Mickey Kaus. And read this from Moxie, too.

And from Jack Dunphy: “What was striking about the service was the uncommon array of people it brought together. She was an uncompromising conservative, but she had close friends at all points along the political spectrum, and indeed it was through our mutual friendship with Cathy that many of us came to know and respect people with whom we otherwise had little in common.”

BLACKLISTING: Not what it used to be, apparently.

Just for the record, though, I’m not blacklisting Ace.

SECURITY COUNCIL VOTES MORE SANCTIONS AGAINST IRAN.

DARFUR UPDATE:

Now in its fifth year, a military campaign by the Sudanese government to crush a rebel movement in Darfur has almost completely reordered the region’s demographics. The conflict is complex but comes down to one in which the government has armed and supported certain nomadic Arab tribesmen against the region’s farming villagers, who are predominantly black Africans.

At least 450,000 people have died from disease and violence in the conflict, and more than 2.5 million — around half the area’s entire population — have fled to vast displacement camps whose numbers continue to swell.

Yet there remains a relatively small number of farming villages such as Kuteri where people are struggling to maintain dignity under the yoke of the government-backed Arab militiamen, who eat their food, drink their water and lounge under the spare shade of low, twisted trees. . . .

“They beat us, but we treat them like family,” added his friend Abdulmalik Ismail. “In our minds, we hate them.”

I can’t imagine why.

SOUTH AFRICA LOWERS VOICE ON HUMAN RIGHTS:

After just three months as one of the Security Council’s nonpermanent members, South Africa is mired in controversy over what could be its great strength: the moral weight it can bring to diplomatic deliberations.

In January, South Africa surprised many, and outraged some, when it voted against allowing the Security Council to consider a relatively mild resolution on human rights issues in Myanmar, whose government is widely seen as one of the most repressive on earth.

Last week the government again angered human rights advocates when it said it would oppose a request to brief the Security Council on the deteriorating situation in Zimbabwe, where the government is pursuing a violent crackdown on its only political opposition. South Africa later changed its stance, but only after dismissing the briefing as a minor event that did not belong on the Council’s agenda.

This week South Africa endangered a delicate compromise among nations often at odds — the United States, China, Russia, France, Britain and Germany — to rein in Iran’s nuclear program.

Thabo Mbeki is a typical African leader, and he has been busily turning South Africa into a typical African nation, marked by support for other thugocracies, a paranoid, unscientific AIDS policy and support for the murderous Mugabe regime. That doesn’t leave much room for moral exceptionalism.

THE MOST EXPENSIVE THINGS ON AMAZON: This one is pretty outrageous. So is this. But it’s all part of the Internet’s rich diversity! (Via BoingBoing).

BILL ROGGIO on Waziristan: “Predictably, the Pakistani government used the fighting in Waziristan to make the claim the failed Waziristan Accord is actually working. The Pakistani media campaign was in high gear working to convince the West the fight was about pro-government tribes uprooting foreign Uzbeks.” Not so much, he says.

IRANIAN HOSTAGE TAKING: A roundup, at Pajamas Media.

JONAH GOLDBERG: “This is such a stupid, unnecessary scandal. Not since some carny deliberately climbed into a cannon and shot himself at a brick wall has there been a better example of self-inflicted stupidity. Doesn’t Gonzales need to spend more time with his family?”

UPDATE: But read this response.

WOW, that dive video I posted the other day has been viewed over 188,000 times.

OH NOOOO: “It’s not hard to imagine that the death of the music industry could also mean the death of overproduced boy bands and Britney Spears knockoffs.”

But what about Baumol’s cost disease?

ALL THE BEST COWBOYS have Chinese eyes.

STILL MORE Fred Thompson talk.

SO I SAW A SATURN AURA at the mall last night, and I have to say that it’s a very attractive car — especially the interior fit and fiinish, which has been a perennial GM weak point. The materials aren’t especially expensive, but they’re very well put together, and very tastefully done. (Good taste shouldn’t cost more.) I don’t know how good a car it is — it won an award at the Detroit Auto Show, but the Popular Mechanics folks were a bit lukewarm — but I thought the look of the interior was really, really good for the price, on the level of an Infiniti or some more upscale brand. Maybe there’s hope for GM after all. There’s going to be a hybrid version.

Because Saturn’s website is lamely Flash-dependent, I can’t link to any pictures directly, but if you go here and look though the photo gallery you can see what I’m talking about.

UPDATE: Reader William Girardot emails:

Perhaps you didn’t intend to, but you seemed to pooh-pooh the award won by the Saturn Aura this year. The Car of the Year award is not just “an award” but is the award most coveted by the automobile manufacturers. It reflects the judgment of 48 automobile journalists who in years past seemed to routinely confer the award on the Toyota and Hondas of the world. Here in Detroit, we are very proud that Saturn won the award (and that Chevrolet took Truck of the Year). For a city that continues to suffer so terribly we at least want the enjoy the small props we earn…

I didn’t mean to pooh-pooh. I’ve been disappointed with Saturn in recent years, but this car looks really good. I’m going to try to post some pics and video later. Hey, maybe I’ll even try to drive one.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Brian Weigand emails:

I read your post on the Aura. It is sweet-looking. As part of my job, I test-drove one of these over the summer (just another day in the salt mines). The driving experience lived up to the looks. The model I tried had shifting paddles on the steering wheel, ala Formula One. Very fun. It seemed to be that you got a lot of car for under $30k.

It seemed that way to me, too. Contrary to some readers who’ve accused me of having it in for the domestic car industry, I’ve actually been wanting them to succeed. It’s just that they haven’t given me a lot to work with.

UPDATE: Video posted here, background here.

RAND SIMBERG is blogging from the Space Access Conference.

IT’S A MONSTER MEDIA MASHUP at AirCongress.

SAY NO TO PORK: Just watched John Stossel’s profile of Tom Coburn on 20/20.

A LIST OF THE MOST UNDERRATED LAW SCHOOLS in America. So is it better to be under-rated, or over-rated? Which would you rather be?

AHMADINEJAD CANCELS HIS U.N. APPEARANCE: I suspect he was taken by surprise by the kidnapping of the British.

IRAQPUNDIT: Sadr in splinters?

PRO-PORK AND PRO-DEFEAT: Austin Bay calls the Democratic Congress’s action a double-barrelled shame, and he’s right.

UPDATE: Don Surber observes: “If Pelosi wants to be commander-in-chief, let her run for president. Otherwise, today’s vote was a bayonet stabbed in the back of every American troop in Iraq.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Thoughts on what it means, from The Mudville Gazette.

Also The Kung Pao Congress: “Given the pork spent today on shrimp, spinach, and peanuts, this seems like the right way to refer to the new House majority.”

MORE: John Hinderaker: “I think it has become clear to pretty much everyone that the Democrats want defeat in Iraq in order to advance their political agenda.”

STILL MORE: The troops prepare for being defunded.

MORE STILL: Indeed: “Funny, I used to think there wasn’t that much difference between Republicans and Democrats.”

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: America needs more Boing Boing Economics!

A CAMEO FROM AHMADINEJAD: Heh.

GEORGE WILL ON RENT-SEEKING:

This is done in the name of “professionalization,” but it really amounts to cartelization. Persons in the business limit access by others — competitors — to full participation in the business.

Being able to control the number of one’s competitors, and to dispense the pleasure of status, is nice work if you can get it, and you can get it if you have a legislature willing to enact “titling laws.” They regulate — meaning restrict — the use of job descriptions. Such laws often are precursors of occupational licensing, which usually means a mandatory credentialing process to control entry into a profession with a particular title.

In Nevada, such regulation has arrived. So in Las Vegas, where almost nothing is illegal, it is illegal — unless you are licensed, or employed by someone licensed — to move, in the role of an interior designer, any piece of furniture, such as an armoire, that is more than 69 inches tall. A Nevada bureaucrat says that “placement of furniture” is an aspect of “space planning” and therefore is regulated — restricted to a “registered interior designer.”

Read the whole thing. The Institute for Justice has done great work challenging these kinds of restrictions, but it’s a case of baling the ocean with a teacup.

VIACOM IS BEING SUED BY MOVEON.ORG, over its demanding removal of a parody on YouTube. Slashdot has more, and observes: “Couple this with the iFilm fiasco reported earlier, and you have to question how a company like Viacom can cry foul when it can’t even accurately account for its own copyrighted material.”

Reading the original story, it’s not clear who’s in the right, but I like the idea of Big Media companies facing pushback when they try to get things taken down that aren’t clearly infringing. Chilling effects can work both ways . . . .

Here’s more from Ars Technica. And it seems to me that some chilling is in order, as suits over parodies seem to be getting out of hand.