IT SEEMS LIKE OUR EFFORT TO FREE THE DEBATES VIDEO has succeeded.

LOU DOBBS SAYS THE U.S. COULD DEPORT ALL ILLEGAL ALIENS if it really wanted to. He’ll say more about that on 60 Minutes tomorrow night.

Will he run for President? He’s sounding like it, and as Mickey Kaus has noted, there’s an immigration gap on the Democratic side that leaves room for a candidate like Dobbs.

GARDEN & GUN MAGAZINE: The Insta-Wife likes the idea. but as she notes, some people don’t.

NEWSTRUST is an experiment in rating and ranking journalism that goes way beyond sites like Digg or Slashdot. The folks running it are afraid their readership is leaning left, and hope that having InstaPundit readers join up will even things out.

There’s a special signup page for InstaPundit readers, so if this appeals to you give it a try.

A LOOK AT Al Qaeda in Bosnia.

DOUG FEITH reviews George Tenet’s book for the Wall Street Journal. But this is a link to the free version on Feith’s website. The concluding paragraph is quite amusing.

It seems clear that the CIA wasn’t fully trusted, and even clearer that it shouldn’t have been. I don’t think that Tenet’s book will do much to improve matters.

RANDY NEAL: “Everything you wanted to know about Compact Fluorescent Bulbs, including the mercury problem.”

INSTAPUNDIT’S ISTANBUL CORRESPONDENT CLAIRE BERLINSKI WRITES ON TURKEY AND ISLAM in the Washington Post:

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who founded the Turkish Republic in 1923, imposed a particularly strict secularism on Turkish society, banning religion from the public sphere. In recent weeks, demonstrators have taken to the streets in massive numbers in support of Kemalist secularism. Westerners watching the footage may be tempted to sigh with approval, imagining this as an outpouring of sympathy with liberal Enlightenment values.

They would be mistaken.

Read the whole thing, which offers a lot of useful insights not found much elsewhere.

FIGHT THE PATRIARCHY: “Saudi Women, Oppressed by Husbands, Turn to Stripping in Internet Chat Rooms in Search of ‘Admiration.'”

OVER AT POPULAR MECHANICS, they’re doing abusive lab testing of lawn mowers. In this case, though, I think it’s the operator who was being abused some of the time.

Still, the unpowered reel mower that they test — it’s very similar to the one that I own — gets high marks:

This archaic, human-powered technology still has its strengths. At a run, it was faster than the walk-behind mower. It was the most maneuverable and lightest machine, and the easiest to store in a crowded garage. The sweat level was high, but it scored well on moral superiority: No emissions, little noise, and the only fuel to buy was Gatorade. Big complaint: It rolls over weeds without cutting them — a real drawback at my place.

That is the main drawback, one that I deal with by using one of these. Another advantage of the unpowered mower is that you can start your kids mowing with them earlier — my daughter mowed her first lawn at the age of 9. And the PopMech advice to wear earplugs when using any kind of power mower is good advice — I’ve done that since I was a teenager (also for live music and shooting), and my hearing remains surprisingly good.

And they’re right that this is good up to about .7 acres. More than that and I’d want something I could ride.

UPDATE: While we’re on the subject, here’s a list of must-have gardening tools — though I wouldn’t agree with all the choices, it’s got some interesting stuff. And — timely enough — a list of items aimed at gardening moms.

I confess, however, that I continue to be unhealthily fascinated with the robot lawn mower. But then, who wouldn’t be?

THE MILBLOGS CONFERENCE IS UNDERWAY — there’s a live stream of the proceedings here.

“I’VE NEVER CASUALLY RUN FOR ANYTHING:” An extended video interview with Fred Thompson on Breitbart TV.

MORE UGLY DEVELOPMENTS IN THE KATHRYN JOHNSTON SHOOTING: This wasn’t the first incident, and the response of local officials is unimpressive:

You’d think that everyone in the chain of command in Atlanta would be looking for ways to prevent more botched raids and more unnecessary violence. Nope. It’s all ass-covering and buck-passing. . . . No question these cops were particularly dirty. But this is a systemic problem driven by bad policy. And if you don’t fix it, Mr. Fowler, you’re going to have more dead innocents, more dead nonviolent offenders, and more dead cops.

Meanwhile–and I really can’t believe this–the officers who killed Kathryn Johnston are worried about their pensions.

They ought to be worried about a lot more than that.

BLOG CAMPAIGN POWER: A myth?

IT’S NO SECRET THAT YOUTUBE IS OFTEN TOO QUICK to take down videos in response to complaints:

Want a video removed from YouTube? Send along a fake takedown notice pretending to be from the copyright holder. At least, it’s a prank that worked for a 15 year old from Perth, Australia, who sent a signed form to YouTube pretending to be from the Australian Broadcasting Company. The form requested the takedown of hundreds of clips from “The Chaser’s War on Everything”.

YouTube not only reacted, but sent warnings to all the uploaders saying their accounts would be deleted if they persisted. As it turns out, the ABC actually encourages the spread of Chasers clips, since they consider the comedy series to be a good promotion for the channel’s content.

YouTube’s fear of controversy has been exploited by others, and many folks on the right think that it’s especially quick to take down videos charged with being politically incorrect. The response is Qube TV.

This seems very constructive to me. YouTube was in first, but there are lots of competitors (I use MotionBox because it has better video quality). Instead of complaining and demanding regulation, just go into competition. The barriers to entry aren’t that high, and that’s how markets are supposed to work.

UPDATE: Reader Jim Ashmore writes:

What I find interesting is the contrasting response to effective information outlets. Those on the right bristled at liberal media domination. What did they do? They went out and built competing outlets such as talk radio and Fox News. And what was the reaction by the left to the dominant effectiveness of conservative talk radio? The attempts to force equal time via the a revived Fairness Doctrine. They have been thus-far ineffective, but watch for its revival under a Democrat administration. Liberals also want to shut down Fox so they can re-dominate television news. I find it interesting that 7 of the 8 major news outlets are slanted to the left and yet, liberals want it 7 of 7 (or more likely 1 of 1).

That is why I find it gratifying to see that conservatives countered YouTube’s bias by creating their own internet video network instead of whining like little cry babies. Bravo to them.

Indeed. Though to be fair, it’s not so much that YouTube is biased, as that it’s limp in the face of pressure from whatever quarter, and the lefty (and Islamist) crowds have organized to take advantage of that.

UPDATE: Bob Krumm, however, is underwhelmed.

BUSH’S RESIGNATION SPEECH, LEAKED. (Via Steven den Beste).

DEBUNKING SOME GUN-CONTROL STATISTICS, at BoingBoing.

PARANOIA STRIKES DEEP.

FRED THOMPSON’S SPEECH: The prepared text.

“LAMBERTED:” John Berlau responds to criticism.

J.D. JOHANNES BLOGS FROM IRAQ:

Ah yes, just 7 months ago Al Anbar was “lost.”

Amidst my travels to neighborhood watch centers and police stations where local Sunni Muslims who have porn on their cell phones are playing hard ball against AQIZ types who would ban porn on cell phones I forgot all about this article in the WaPo last September.

Anbar is so “lost” now politically that there is a waiting list for anbaris to join the IA and IP.

It is so lost, that in the AO I hope to visit next the local Sheiks have declared war on AQIZ and the neighboring tribe supporting AQIZ.

It is so lost, the local neighborhood watch centers deliver captured IEDs to Marine Combat Outposts.

It is so wildly stinking lost that…wait, it is not lost.

In fact, the situation has flipped so much in 7 months that the heavy lifting in Al Anbar may be coming to a close–the heavy lifting being the political work of flipping the tribes to support the coalition and take charge of their own security.

He’ll be talking about this on Hannity & Colmes tonight, in just a few minutes.

UPDATE: Oops — I misread the email. The post is J.D.’s, but it’s David Chavarria, the executive producer of Outside the Wire, their documentary.

And wow, Alan Colmes is acting really defensive, while Chavarria is really calm and informational. Chavarria explained what the troops think, as shown in the documentary, Colmes started arguing with him, and Chavarria just calmly explained that he wasn’t arguing politics, he was reporting what the troops said.

PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE ON LOUSY PACKAGING:

I’ve been opening a bunch of new electonic gizmos today, all of which came in those damnable plastic clamshells. Naturally, my hands are now covered with small cuts. I got off lucky, however, compared to some victims of the packaging industry. Did you know that “injuries from plastic packaging resulted in 6,400 visits to emergency rooms in 2004”?!

I’m not usually a big fan of Trial Lawyers Inc., but if somebody were to bring a class action against the manufacturers of plastic clamshells on behalf of all of us who have been wounded by them over the years, I’d sign up in a minute.

I hate those things, which are a subspecies of packaging demonstrating that the manufacturers don’t really care about their customers. See also CD and DVD packaging . . . .

A LOOK AT NANOTECHNOLOGY IN RUSSIA:

Of the many questions that must be answered about molecular manufacturing, one of the most important is: Who will attain the technology first?

It matters a great deal if this powerful and potentially disruptive new manufacturing technique is developed and controlled by aggressive military interests, commercial entities, Open Source advocates, liberal democracies, or some combination thereof. How each of those disparate groups, with different priorities and motivations, plan to use and (maybe) share the technology is an issue that bears serious investigation. That’s a major purpose behind CRN’s project to create a series of scenarios depicting various futures in which molecular manufacturing could be developed.

One likely player in this high-stakes, high-tech drama is Russia. . . .

In summary, it looks like: A) Russia will spend huge amounts of money over the next several years in an effort to become a world player in nanotech development; B) at least in the early stages, that spending will focus mostly on early-generation nanoscale technologies, and not on molecular manufacturing; and C) this announcement, and the language used in making it, would suggest that an arms race built around nano-enabled weapons is more likely now than it was before.

Just one more item to brighten your weekend.

UPDATE: An upbeat take from Dave Schuler.

MICHAEL YON ON THE SURGE, interviewed from Iraq on this week’s Blog Week in Review. Plus, his thoughts on the Army’s iffy relationship with milbloggers.

THE FOLKS AT BLOGADS are doing their annual reader survey — I still participate even though I don’t use blogads any more, because it produces lots of useful information. So please do me a favor and take a few minutes to fill out their online form. The survey’s a bit long, but you can quit anytime you get bored — it’s just the first few pages that are really important. The stuff about your favorite booze, etc., is less so.

Please take my blog reader survey!