UNVEILING my next car.

Or maybe this is my next car.

Well, from my perspective they’re equally affordable! How’s that for putting the best face on things?

JOHN STOSSEL ON THE “FEAR-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX:”

Newsrooms are full of English majors who acknowledge that they are not good at math, but still rush to make confident pronouncements about a global-warming “crisis” and the coming of bird flu. . . .

Here’s another example. What do you think is more dangerous, a house with a pool or a house with a gun? When, for “20/20,” I asked some kids, all said the house with the gun is more dangerous. I’m sure their parents would agree. Yet a child is 100 times more likely to die in a swimming pool than in a gun accident.

Parents don’t know that partly because the media hate guns and gun accidents make bigger headlines. Ask yourself which incident would be more likely to be covered on TV.

Media exposure clouds our judgment about real-life odds. Of course, it doesn’t help that viewers are as ignorant about probability as reporters are.

Read the whole thing. I like that “fear-industrial complex” tag. It’s certainly apt. As Stossel concludes: “Instead of educating people to real dangers, we scare them about things that hardly matter.”

And here’s evidence for Stossel’s point about coverage of guns vs. other causes of death.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Opposition to the Bridge to Nowhere, even in Alaska:

But all is not well in a city that looks on the new bridge with growing skepticism. Citing the project’s costs and risk to a local economy whose benefits are “contingent, speculative and not significant,” the city’s planning commission unanimously recommended against going ahead with the project.

Every neighborhood organization that has spoken to the project has recommended against the bridge or demanded guarantees that no Anchorage neighborhood would be harmed in its construction and city funds will not be used to build or maintain the bridge. . . .

The bottom line is that KABATA is completing a final Environmental Impact Statement while watching nervously over Beluga whales in the inlet and trying to sell a bridge that too many Anchorage residents simply don’t want.

But it’s enriching politically connected contractors.

ON THE WINGS OF HEROES, a World War Two book for kids, gets a positive review: “As we look for heroes in our own time, Peck give us clear-eyed vision of the courage and caring we seek.”

THE U.S. TRADE BALANCE WITH CHINA: Some surprisingly positive news. Does Lou Dobbs know about this?

BING WEST AND OWEN WEST REPORT FROM ANBAR: Read the whole thing.

“MUDDLE DIPLOMACY:” It’s “stupid and vacuous.”

AN ARMY, NOT A MILITIA: Michael Totten embeds with the Peshmerga. Remember that his work is supported by reader donations, so if you like it, hit the tipjar.

NO DELL WORKERS WERE HARMED DURING THE MAKING OF THIS BLOG POST: Jeff Jarvis has drinks with Dell.

I should note that after I put up this post, somebody from Dell emailed me to get my service tag number so that they could give an attaboy to the support guy I talked to. So obviously they’ve started paying attention to blogs.

LESSONS FROM THE FREE KAREEM STORY, and comparisons with Tunisia.

One difference is that I’ve gotten a lot of emails from Kareem supporters, and none on the Tunisia story. I don’t know if that goes to organization, or what. But that kind of thing is essential. Like most bloggers, I’m happy to help out when a blogger is persecuted, but I have to know about it first.

THE ANTI-ROBERT-BYRD: Fred Thompson doesn’t want a road named after him.

IN THE MAIL: Michael S. Malone’s new book, Bill & Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World’s Greatest Company. Looks very interesting, and it sports one of the most impressive collections of blurbs I’ve ever seen.

UPDATE: Plus, thoughts on technological progress in book-writing. Ain’t it the truth!

GENERAL PETRAEUS ON MCCAIN’S TRIP TO IRAQ:

UPDATE: Be sure to read this post by IraqPundit, too, which contrasts media treatment of McCain’s trip with media treatment of Pelosi’s travels.

ANOTHER UPDATE: HERE’S MORE ON MCCAIN IN BAGHDAD, from Max Boot, who’s there now:

Here’s the perspective the press isn’t providing: We are in the middle of a tough, bloody war in Iraq. Throughout 2006, the war was going very badly, especially in Baghdad. Large chunks of the city were subject to a bloody campaign of ethnic cleansing, murder, and terrorism. Sunni families fled. Markets closed. Normal life ground to a halt. Those perilous trends have been stopped in the past few months and are beginning to be reversed. This is due to an increased deployment of Iraqi and American troops, and especially to the fact that Americans are no longer staying on their giant forward operating bases. They are patrollng more intensively from joint security stations and small combat outposts located in the middle of the city.

Though only three of the five extra brigades scheduled to be deployed have yet arrived in Baghdad, the offensive has already paid big dividends. A semblance of normality is returning in some neighborhoods, markets are reopening, sectarian murders and ethnic cleansings have been dramatically reduced. The situation still isn’t great, but at least the downward trend has been stopped. There have been a few big suicide bombings lately that obscure this improvement, but most of these have been outside Baghdad, where the current security operation is focused. Needless to say, coalition forces can’t magically pacify the entire country overnight—and that can’t be the measure of success or failure.

The fact that McCain was able and willing to walk around the Shorja market indicates that things are getting better, even if Iraq remains a war zone. Of course McCain had heavy security; he’s an especially attractive target for insurgents. But the market was functioning normally while he was there, and he wasn’t surrounded by bodyguards. He walked around freely without a helmet (though he was wearing body armor), and mingled with Iraqis. So did the other members of his delegation, as well as General David Petraeus, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq.

Reporters may think this was like a Sunday stroll in Central Park, but that wasn’t the view of the U.S. embassy’s security coordinator, who refused to sign off on McCain’s visit because he thought it was too risky. The Senator thought otherwise, and he made an important point with his visit.

Read the whole thing.

JOHN TIERNEY: “Ordering the E.P.A. to address global warming may be a legal victory for environment groups, but it will probably just slow progress against global warming. The Environmental Procrastination Agency, as I like to call it, has a hard enough time taking action against routine pollutants. It’s in even worse position to deal with something as complicated as carbon dioxide, because the agency was founded on a fantasy: that scientific experts can transcend both politics and economics. . . . It took the agency 15 years to deal with pollution from leaded gasoline, which was a trivially simple problem compared with global warming.”

Tierney recommends David Schoenbrod’s book on politics and the environment, which I mentioned here a while back. It’s worth reading.

THE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN LAW SCHOOLS turns out to be acting like a monopolist. Go figure.

BIG BUCKS BARACK: “This is a guy who was an Illinois state senator just over two years ago, who didn’t so much as hint he was running until late last year, who had no national infrastructure, and who isn’t married to a former president. And yet his $25-million haul in the first quarter nearly matched Hillary’s 26 mil.”

THE WASHINGTON POST EDITORIALIZES:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) offered an excellent demonstration yesterday of why members of Congress should not attempt to supplant the secretary of state when traveling abroad. . . .

The really striking development here is the attempt by a Democratic congressional leader to substitute her own foreign policy for that of a sitting Republican president. Two weeks ago Ms. Pelosi rammed legislation through the House of Representatives that would strip Mr. Bush of his authority as commander in chief to manage troop movements in Iraq. Now she is attempting to introduce a new Middle East policy that directly conflicts with that of the president. We have found much to criticize in Mr. Bush’s military strategy and regional diplomacy. But Ms. Pelosi’s attempt to establish a shadow presidency is not only counterproductive, it is foolish.

Indeed. If Bush and Cheney were really evil, they’d both resign and stick the Democrats with a Pelosi Presidency for the next two years. The Democratic Party would never recover. Alas, neither would the country.

MICKEY KAUS: “And here I thought I was just bitterly lashing out because Krugman called me a Rhinoceros!”

FRED THOMPSON UPDATE: Writing in the New York Sun, Jim Geraghty says that Thompson would fill a void in the GOP offering.

WHY DO THEY HATE US HIM? Al Qaeda targets the Dalai Lama. But I thought they were only mad at us because Bush wouldn’t ratify Kyoto or something?

THOUGHTS ON INFLATION at The Economist:

It is possible to argue that inflation targets are unnecessary, provided that the central bank has a credible reputation as an inflation fighter. True enough, but inflation targeting gives bankers an instant measure of credibility, because markets know exactly what to expect. They also relieve bankers of some of the political pressure they inevitably receive to loosen up the money supply. . . .

Speaking of which, this recent piece from our Finance and Economics section highlights what happened back when central bankers did give into the political pressure to inflate the money supply: a little fast growth early on, and then a whole lot of misery later. In America, it took the deepest recession since the 1930’s to finally quiet inflation down again–and it’s really only now that American and British interest rates are finally settled back to their natural levels from the non-fiat currency days.

Inflation is highly damaging, and also highly tempting to governments that want to avoid short-term pain, or get rid of troublesome debt by inflating it away. Neither approach is worth it in the long run.

A LOOK AT THE SUNLIGHT FOUNDATION’S WORK in promoting open government and fighting pork.

GREEN-CONS — that’s kind of like crunchy-cons, I guess. I saw this Prius in Washington yesterday.

ANOTHER PICTURE from Market Square.

HAROLD KOH FOR SUPREME COURT? Professor Bainbridge doesn’t like the idea. Neither does David Bernstein (“by all accounts a nice guy, a good fundraiser, and beloved by his students, but is also a highly partisan liberal Democrat under whose tenure as dean conservative and libertarian students have felt increasingly uncomfortable”).

I share at least some of their concerns, but the worry seems a bit premature.