ERIC MULLER HAS A ROUNDUP of all his posts on Uncle Leo and the Holocaust. And Doug Weinstein has some thoughts.

SCHLOCK AND AWE: “And here we thought shock and awe was about bringing Saddam Hussein to his knees.” Heh.

GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS, from Jules Crittenden.

IN LIGHT OF MY EARLIER POST ON IMPORTED OIL, I should probably note this column from today’s WSJ which makes an important point:

As long as the U.S. remains part of a global market in fuels, the impact of events abroad will not stop at the border. For example, in a crisis that cut off supplies from Saudi Arabia, the price of oil needed in Europe and Asia might double or triple overnight. Prices would rise in response in the U.S. even if we weren’t importing oil, as markets directed the fuel that was available to the highest bidders.

That’s true — and it also means, of course, that a shutdown of oil at its source wouldn’t just hurt the U.S., but all of Saudi Arabia’s customers. And it certainly suggests that building up domestic sources — especially things like oil shale — will help buffer shocks from elsewhere.

THE CARNIVAL OF CARS IS UP! Lots of other carnivals, of course, at BlogCarnival.com.

STUART BUCK: “The way that our country treats chronic pain sufferers who use too much pain medication seems insane to me. I can’t find any evidence that Oxycontin, say, is anywhere near as dangerous as alcohol — i.e., tens of thousands of fatalities every single year. But we don’t make people get a prescription to buy a beer, let alone throw people in jail for 25 years for having a bottle of vodka in the house.”

And read this on the Hurwitz case, by John Tierney.

THOUGHTS ON OBAMA VOTES AS RACISM OFFSETS?

Let’s hope it’s more genuine than the carbon offsets are turning out to be . . . .

GEORGE TENET’S NEW BOOK inspires some thoughts from Tom Maguire.

Plus, a look back at intelligence. And here’s another one in which he seemed pretty confident that we’d find “caches of weapons of mass destruction” once Saddam was overthrown. Plus, Zarqawi. So he was batting .500!

YOU CAN FEEL THE EXCITEMENT: “After 6 years of the Bush presidency, we finally have a sex scandal. And not the Mark Foley naughty e-mails stuff. A Clintonesque affair complete with hookers.”

If we legalized prostitution, would stuff like this still be a scandal? We should, anyway.

ZELLMENTUM! The Draft Zell movement seems to be taking off!

NICK GILLESPIE TALKS ABOUT IMMIGRATION, on Penn & Teller’s Bullshit! YouTube version available here.

ROSS DOUTHAT moves to The Atlantic. They’re really snapping up talent.

DEMOGRAPHICS: Will Wilkinson asks: “So what explains the fact that America is the land where white people reproduce?”

BUMBLING THE BEE SCARE: I like the photos.

SENATE DEMOCRATS are rallying to Harry Reid’s defense against that loudmouthed conservative David Broder.

The real message, of course, is that they expect the Post and its columnists to stick to their real job — attacking Republicans — and not stray off the reservation. If I were Broder, I’d respond with a column on Harry Reid’s land deals.

HIRING “SCANDALS” AT THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE: Todd Zywicki is far from scandalized:

Oh my goodness–a bust of James Madison in his very office! Gracious, a civil rights lawyer who clerked for Charles Pickering–who “congressional Democrats … contended” was hostile to civil rights (apparently since some congressional Democrats “contended it,” all of his clerks are disqualified from working in the office).

The other example cited in the article seems odd as well–why is it supposed to be a problem that a graduate of Regent Law School might be interested in working on “some religious liberties” cases. Would we be similarly shocked if a minority graduate of Southern Law School, for example, expressed a particular interest in working on Voting Rights cases, or a former intern at a pro-choice organization was interested in reproductive rights cases?

The unintentional irony of this is that these examples are provided as examples of the “nonideological” bona fides of the career lawyers who offered them as examples. The career lawyer who is cited (as well as the authors of the article) seems confident that any right-minded person would shocked and outraged that a lawyer was a member of the Federalist Society and had a bust of James Madison in his office or that one of Judge Pickering’s clerks worked in the civil rights division. . . . But if these are the “smoking gun” examples that are the best ones that career attorneys can offer as conservative ideology run amuck at the DOJ, then it seems to me that this says more about the real biases of the supposedly “nonpolitical” attitudes of DOJs career attorneys and the ideological parochialism of the Washington Post than about some sort of hiring “scandal” at DOJ. If these are the sorts of trivialities that career DOJ attorneys consider to be evidence of an extreme ideological shift to the right at the DOJ, then forgive me for being skeptical that the end result of giving career lawyers a monopoly on hiring for these positions is going to eliminate ideology from the hiring process.

I guess they should have called it a diversity hiring program.

‘IT’S A SHAME CARS DON’T RUN ON COGNITIVE DISSONANCE:” Mocking celebrity hypocrisy on the environment at The Daily Show.

SANDMONKEY HAS QUIT BLOGGING: “One of the chief reasons is the fact that there has been too much heat around me lately. I no longer believe that my anonymity is kept, especially with State Secuirty agents lurking around my street and asking questions about me since that day . . . .And speaking of the state of the egyptian blogsphere, it has been pretty depressing in its own right. One has to wonder at some point the futulity of being a keyboard warrior in a country where nothing seems to matter to its people anymore.”

AT BOINGBOING, an interesting post by Cory Doctorow on Dan Gilbert’s book, Stumbling on Happiness.

ON BILL RICHARDSON:

Isn’t Richardson the manliest of the Democratic candidates, with his guns and his sports? Unfortunately, he doesn’t look athletic and, in any case, Democrats seem to be immune to such red state attractions. At least not until after they’ve chosen their candidate.

Richardson is polling way ahead of other Democrats among InstaPundit readers. As I’ve mentioned before, I like his positions on space, too. Interestingly, Kos likes Richardson. That may not be surprising, as he’s been happy to back Democrats who look like they might win Red State votes — e.g., James Webb.

VOTING ON the greatest car chase in movie history.

IOWAHAWK offers an amusing take on gun control efforts.

ROGER SIMON on the real life and the phony life.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY notes recent Al Qaeda attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure and observes: “Perhaps the most devastating attack Osama bin Laden could deliver on America wouldn’t be in America. It would be in Saudi Arabia, on its oil supply. Saudi Arabia is the world’s top oil exporter, and Osama has called for attacks on its refineries and pipelines expressly to cripple our economy.”

In the short term, expanding the Strategic Petroleum Reserve will help. In the longer term, less dependence on imported oil would help more.

UPDATE: Well, here’s a report that Colorado oil shale is back in play. Better to move away from fossil fuels as much as possible, but the ones we use should probably be domestic.

OKAY, SO I HAVE A PRETTY NICE ELECTRIC BLOWER-VAC, except that the vac attachment got smashed and it would probably cost more to replace it than to just get a whole new blower. I’d be happy to just buy another — it’s been fine and it’s pretty cheap — but I wonder if there’s a cordless blower-vac that works well enough to be worth buying. Everything I can find seems kind of wimpy, with disclaimers like this: “While this blower provides adequate air velocity for doing maintenance cleaning in the areas mentioned above, it is not designed to be a blower for use in moving fall leaves on the lawn.” Am I just asking too much?

I find the blower-vac one of the most useful yard tools out there. What’s your favorite?