RED QUEEN’S RACE: Ed Driscoll looks at the future of the media.

BIZARRE DEATH WISH UPDATE:

Pollster Frank Luntz for the past decade issued warnings to his fellow Republicans that they did not want to hear, but never has been so out of touch with them as he is today. “The Republican message machine is a skeleton of its former self,” Luntz told me. “These people have no idea how the American people react to them.”

Luntz sees a disconnect between Republicans and voters that projects a grim future for the party. That contradicts what House and Senate Republicans are saying to each other in closed party conferences. While Luntz views 2006 election defeats as ominous portents, the party’s congressional leaders see only transitory setbacks and now dwell on bashing Democrats.

Back when we talked to Ken Mehlman last spring the GOP seemed to be out of touch and in denial. And that was before the elections.

UPDATE: Bob Krumm:

If at any time in the last fifteen years you had told me that I would consider supporting Hillary Clinton over one of the possible Republican presidential nominees, I would have accused you of being drunk. But here I am, soberly in realization of the fact that on foreign policy, at least, Hillary Clinton is preferable to Republican Senator Chuck Hagel.

There’s a lot more of this kind of thing out there than GOP folks in Washington appreciate.

INSTAPUNK IS GOING TO IRAQ.

FROM MARK BLUMENTHAL: A look at how Rudy Giuliani is polling.

I´M BLOGGING via the Nokia N800 internet tablet. Kind of nifty, but typing with a stylus is a bit awkward. I’m reviewing it for Popular Mechanics.

FREE SPEECH ping-pong.

GOOGLE NEWS SEEMS TO BE DOWN, but Ask News is working just fine. Google seems to be having problems that go way beyond Blogger alone.

JOHN LEO looks at free speech on campus, or the lack thereof.

JUST FINISHED WATCHING J.D. JOHANNES’ IRAQ DOCUMENTARY, Outside the Wire. It’s really good — very first-person, lots of raw footage, lots of one-on-one with the Marines he accompanied. It’s the kind of thing that should be reaching a much, much wider audience.

UPDATE: I’ve bumped this up to the top, because I posted it late last night and I want to be sure it gets noticed. There’s an online trailer here.

SILENCING BLOGGERS IN TENNESSEE? I think that this legislation would probably fail under both the Federal and Tennessee constitutions; requiring publishers to take down content upon an allegation of libel would seem to go beyond the sort of thing already struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in Tornillo, and the Tennessee Constitution is supposedly more protective of free speech than the Federal constitution, though there’s not much elaboration on that in the caselaw. The provision would also seem to be preempted by the federal Communications Decency Act.

I have more thoughts on libel, the CDA, and efforts to silence bloggers here. Legal analysis aside, it seems like it’s mostly an effort to protect incumbent politicians from scrutiny.

UPDATE: That was fast! The bill is being withdrawn, according to an update to the post linked above.

THEY’VE ANNOUNCED THE PUBLICATION DATE for the Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and Brendan Loy isn’t happy since it’s just before the bar exam. He opines that J.K. Rowling must want him to fail the bar.

ANN ALTHOUSE HAS MADE THE SWITCH:

Oh, how I wish I hadn’t switched to New Blogger! . . . I am now bursting with hate for Blogger. I hate hate hate New Blogger. After that last post, I tried to open the comments page and got an error message. I tried to open the blog in a different broswer and got a “Server Error.” Trying to open a “Create Post” window went nowhere for the longest time. Getting to the blog has been taking way too long ever since the switch. Perhaps you’ve noticed.

You know, for months, I wasn’t able to respond to the invitation to switch to New Blogger because it was not ready to deal with very large blogs like mine. (I have over 7,000 posts.) Well, I tend to think they still weren’t ready. But now I’ve switched, and I’m in this Blogger hell. And I have no way to contact anyone at Blogger support. They’ve scrubbed the site of any reference to an email address where you might reach an actual person. And it was never — as far as I know — possible to contact anyone at Blogger, AKA Google.

I think I’ll advise Helen to hold off on switching. And I’ll note that Google’s success depends on things working right, because if they don’t, there’s nobody to call, and they quickly transform from cute-but-big company to hated uncaring corporate monolith.

TPM MUCKRAKER REPORTS:

West Virginia congressman Alan Mollohan (D) has used $160,000 worth of services by a white collar criminal defense firm, according to new campaign filings.

Mollohan, who chairs the House panel which controls the Justice Department budget (including the FBI), has been under investigation by the FBI for a rather knotty mess of nonprofits, friends and real estate deals that appear to have made a lot of money for a lot of people.

According to documents filed by his campaign with the Federal Elections Commission, the law firm Kellogg Huber Hansen Todd Evan has collected $140,000 from his campaign. The campaign says that as of Dec. 31, 2006, it owed the firm another $20,000,

Mollohan has said that because of the investigation he would recuse himself from decisions concerning the FBI’s budget, but some believe that doesn’t resolve the conflict of interest.

(Via Don Surber).

BILL FRIST LAUNCHES YourIdeasAmerica.com.

YEAH: “If I had to vote today, I’d pick Giuliani too, but it’s much easier for me, because I support abortion rights and the other liberal causes that make conservatives worry about Giuliani.”

IT’S A QUAGMIRE:

The New York Times Co. posted a $648 million loss for the fourth quarter on Wednesday as it absorbed an $814.4 million charge to write down the value of its struggling New England properties, The Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. . . .

The company originally paid $1.1 billion for the Globe in 1993 and $296 million for the Worcester paper in 2000.

The Times reported a loss amounting to $4.50 a share for the October- December period. It earned $63.1 million, or 43 cents a share, a year ago.

Reader Matt Graham writes: “NYT in quagmire. Should immediately begin plans for withdrawal from newspaper business.”

Don Surber: “I notice the Wall Street Journal does not operate this way.”

The Times empire should be making as much money as the WSJ’s, and I think it’s bad management that has made the difference.

REFORM IN KNOX COUNTY:

On the new Knox County Commission is the son of an ex-commissioner, the father of a current commissioner, and the wife of another ex-commissioner.

Also, there’s a Sheriff’s Office employee and one of the booted commissioners is now the Knox County Clerk.

Boy, term limits really bring in new blood, don’t they?

Part of the problem is that not that many people want the jobs.

STEVE FORBES IS PUSHING the Iraq Oil Trust idea.

LOADS MORE LIBBY TRIAL BLOGGING at Tom Maguire’s place. “In a brutally devastating but gentlemanly low key way the defense destroyed a key prosecution witness.”

And lots more on developments at Duke at K.C. Johnson’s, plus a link to this oped by Johnson.

UPDATE: No, it wasn’t a misquote from Tom above — I cut-and-pasted accurately, but then he fixed the error. I’ve followed suit.

BACK BEFORE THE ELECTIONS, I wondered if the Republicans suffered from some sort of “bizarre death wish.” Hugh Hewitt thinks it’s getting worse.

And reader C.J. Burch writes:

The Repubs are on very dangerous ground here I think. Any Sox fan can tell you this. It is very easy to really, really hate people you once loved when you feel they have betrayed you. (Think Roger Clemens, Sox fans) The Republican base isn’t going to get over this, I don’t think…not ever. Of course the winners will be conservative Southern Democrats, and there are still some around. Folks like Jim Marshall here in Georgia will step into the vacume just fine. The Democrats took the South for granted and tossed it away. Looks like the Repubs are trying the same gambit. If they don’t think southern (Jacksonian) voters will find somehwere else to go they’ve lost their minds.

I realize that you go to war with the political class you have, but still. . . .

HOW NOT TO TALK about politics and religion.

THE NOT-SO-FINAL countdown.

THE PERIL OF A NEWSPAPER BLOG “…is that a reporter might say what he actually thinks before an editor catches up with him and makes him stop.”

UPDATE: More here from Blackfive and here from Marc Danziger. Danziger observes:

Look, Arkin’s a pretty good writer, and a veteran. But if you look at his opus in Google, you find him on the anti-military side of almost every issue that’s come along since the 1980’s.

And to appoint him lead blogger on military affairs for arguable the leading newspaper in the country certainly looks a lot like appointing ‘Focus On The Family’s’ James Dobson as the lead rap music critic.

I’m not saying that the major media are liberal, or biased against the military or anything. But this sure makes a good case for it.

Read the whole thing(s).

MORE: A related observation from The Mudville Gazette. And reader Ted Doty writes:

The problem is maybe less what Arkin wrote, than what his commenters wrote. After reading some of them, I feel like I should take a shower:

” I applaud the use of the word “mercenary” to describe the soldiers comprising our standing army. The rarity of its use in this context compelled me to comment.

“U.S. soldiers are by no means “volunteers,” any more than I am a volunteer plumber. When a person accepts compensation in the form of respect, glory, and not least of all monetary benefits (not to mention a host of other privileges for serving one’s country after service is completed) a transaction is made in which both sides receive some benefit. Fisherman in Alaska take on relatively larger risks in exchage [sic] for relatively larger reward. Why is the U.S. military of the 21st century so different in this regard?”

Jeez … is is 2004 all over again? Not that I question their patriotism or anything …

No. Though it’s no fairer to blame Arkin for his commenters, I stress, than any other blogger. But that doesn’t make the comments better. Most of them, however, take a decidedly different tone, more hostile to Arkin than to the troops.

AN INTERESTING LOOK AT the state of the economy.

XENI JARDIN continues her series on Guatemala.