HUGH HEWITT offers a weekend assignment.

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: “Can the ‘Seattle Democrats’ Save Globalization?”

JACK SHAFER SAYS WE SHOULD ABOLISH THE FCC: He makes a strong argument.

FRED THOMPSON is podcasting.

WIN A FREE TRIP TO SPACE? That’s what FreeSpaceShot.com is promising. Detalis here.

“BLUE DOG” DEMOCRATS to split with party over Iraq?

HEH.

ASTROTURFING THE ANTIWAR MOVEMENT: An interesting report from The Mudville Gazette. Are parts of the news media this easily suckered, or are they happy to play along?

MICHAEL TOTTEN POSTS A PHOTO ESSAY from Hezbollah’s “Capital” in Lebanon.

Meanwhile, Michael Yon posts a report from Ramadi in Anbar province, Iraq. Excerpt:

Saddam is past tense. There was more consternation among these soldiers when the CSM announced that Coalition-provided fuel was being cut off to Iraqi security forces on 31 December 2006. Along the route, most of the soldiers he informed were surprised at this news. Many soldiers who heard this edict protested in some way or another, but the CSM was firm: No more free gas starting 1 January 2007.

The CSM made it clear that the fuel-edict did not come from Washington, but was an order from the Multi National Force in Iraq. Later during a private meeting between the CSM and an American lieutenant colonel where I was present, the LTC said this blanket fuel-policy could cause his mission to fall flat, and he wanted General Casey to hear that message.

The previous sentence might seem trivial, but to military professionals, the sentence is worth a book. It speaks volumes about the integrity of the lieutenant colonel and to the command culture under General Casey, where honest-and-informed opinions are valued.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Totten link was bad before. Fixed now. Sorry!

WHEN POLITICIANS TALK ABOUT “SACRIFICE:” Jim Geraghty does some digging.

NOT A SURGICAL NANOBOT, but close: a surgical microbot.

THE AKAKA BILL IS BACK: Lots of background information here.

IN THE MAIL: Scott Page’s The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies. Defenders of affirmative action as practiced today will find this limited comfort, though, as he’s calling for actual differences among people in organizations, and his analysis provides as much support for notions that universities should hire conservatives and newspapers should hire military veterans, as for requiring minority hires.

Plus, from Frank J. Fleming, his blockbuster The Chronicles of Dubya Volume 1: The Defeat of Saddam.

Frank J. advertises it as “The dumbest book ever written about the Bush administration!” I dunno, there’s an awful lot of competition for that spot.

And it’s blurbed by me, though curiously I don’t remember actually doing that . . . . And I should note that this link counts as a compensated endorsement, as he sent me a free t-shirt that says “Ask me about puppie smoothies.” No, really, he did.

GOOD NEWS: “Mild winter weather has something to do with it. So does heavy selling by financial funds. But a largely overlooked factor in the recent plunge in oil prices may portend an end to the multiyear rise in crude: For the first time in years, the developed world is burning less of it. Fresh data from the International Energy Agency show oil consumption in the 30 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development fell 0.6% in 2006. Though the decline appears small, it marks the first annual drop in more than 20 years among the OECD countries. . . . The fall in oil use by the industrialized world is a sign that the reactions to higher oil prices by businesses and consumers from the U.S. to Germany to Japan may be adding up to a cycle-turning downdraft in demand. The resulting shift in global cash flows could mean a big boost for oil consumers’ economies at the expense of producers and exporters.”

FEDERAL EMPLOYEES owe $2.8 billion in taxes, according to a report at TaxProf.

DOES AGING AMERICA EQUAL ECONOMIC PROBLEMS?

Chairman Ben Bernanke warned the U.S. Congress on Thursday that failure to take action soon to deal with the budgetary strains posed by an aging U.S. population could lead to serious economic harm.

“Unfortunately, economic growth alone is unlikely to solve the nation’s impending fiscal problems,” Bernanke told the Senate Budget Committee.

Bernanke acknowledged that official projections suggest the U.S. budget deficit could stabilize or shrink in the next few years, but cautioned: “We are experiencing what seems likely to be the calm before the storm.”

Left unchecked, the costs of so-called entitlement programs, such as
Social Security and Medicare, are set to soar as increasing numbers of the baby boom generation retire.

Of course, we could try to deal with this problem by having people live longer.

UPDATE: Yes, of course they’d have to retire later, too. Follow the link, please.

IT’S THOSE THEOCRATIC RED STATES IN THE SOUTH AGAIN: A life sentence for adultery?

Oh, wait . . . .

UPDATE: On the other hand, a murder conviction gets you an apartment and free college tuition — plus, judging from the photo, a really tacky suit, complete with pimp hat and fur coat.

PUTTING THE BRAKES ON LIGHT SPEED:

Scientists said yesterday that they had achieved a long-sought goal of slowing waves of light to a relatively leisurely pace and using those harnessed pulses to store an image.

Physicists said the new approach to taming light could hasten the arrival of a futuristic era in which computers and other devices will process information on optical beams instead of with electricity, which for all its spark is still cumbersome compared with light.

This is big — read the story to see why this new approach is a breakthrough — but I’d rather they were able to push the speed of light way up, thus enabling fast interstellar travel . . . .

UPDATE: Ask and ye shall receive: Reader Stephen Waters sends this report (see the box toward the bottom):

ringing light to a standstill is not the only effect that a laser-manipulated atomic gas can have on a light pulse. Last year Lijun Wang and co-workers at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, pushed the speed of an electromagnetic pulse to greater than the speed of light in vacuum by passing the pulse through a chamber filled with caesium gas . . .

When a carefully tuned probe pulse was then fired into the medium, its speed became greater than the vacuum light speed. In fact, the pulse appeared to come out of the medium 60 ns before it entered!

However, Einstein’s general theory of relativity was not violated because information – due to quantum-mechanical fluctuations – cannot be carried faster than the vacuum light speed, even by the superluminal light pulses.

A long way from warp-drive still, alas.

INTERESTING FOLLOWUP to the Reuters photoshop scandal: “In all of Reuters’ statements and reports on the incident, they’ve never mentioned that a ‘top photo editor’ was also fired. Why were they secretive about this, and why won’t they release the editor’s name?”

AL-SADR AIDE ARRESTED: “U.S. and Iraqi forces arrested a top aide to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr on Friday in Baghdad, an official in his office said.”

Nice, I guess, but Muqtada himself should enjoy no immunity here.

UPDATE: More thoughts from TigerHawk: “Having failed to bail out in time, it is very heartening that al-Maliki is now supporting a severe crackdown on the Shiite extremists. He knows that his personal risk increases with every Shiite militia commander he arrests, and eventually he will pass through a door through which he cannot return. Still, he is going after al-Sadr’s thugs. That means that al-Maliki believes, or at least hopes, that (i) the new plan has a chance for success.”

STEPHEN SPRUIELL:

The Senate has passed an ethics reform bill, 96-2. The process was not entirely without conservative victories: . . .

All that said, Sen. Tom Coburn (one of the two senators who voted no) had the best take on the bill that just passed: “The problem in Washington is not lobbyists; the problem is us. Unfortunately, many of the provisions in this bill are focused on the wrong problem.”

Indeed.

THE KNIVES ARE STILL GOOD, but the Swiss Army is in trouble.

THE ABA, LAW SCHOOL DIVERSITY, AND ACCREDITATION: Gail Heriot posts another case study.

GOOD NEWS: “Oil prices briefly fell below $50 per barrel Thursday for the first time in 20 months, after the U.S. government reported larger-than-expected jumps in crude oil and gasoline inventories. Oil has dropped 17 percent since the end of 2006 amid weeks of mild winter weather in the U.S. Northeast, a key consumer of heating fuels, and growing energy stockpiles. Stockpiles of gasoline and distillate fuels, like heating oil and diesel, also rose last week, the Energy Information Administration said.”