PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Members of Congress want to keep their earmarks:

The Senate’s Democratic leaders have a political problem with earmarks. Ever since the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska captured the public’s imagination last year, they have been on record against legislators stealthily slipping in their favorite spending projects. But most senators, from both parties, really want to keep earmarks. An ingenious effort to reconcile those conflicting political desires created a remarkable tableau in the U.S. Senate Tuesday.

First-term Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina rose on the Senate floor shortly before noon to request unanimous consent for immediate enactment of a rule requiring full disclosure of earmarks. But the Democratic leadership was forewarned. Just before DeMint took the floor, the Appropriations Committee — led by Sen. Robert Byrd, the Senate’s king of pork — issued its own flawed anti-earmark regulation. Then, Majority Whip Dick Durbin objected to passage of the DeMint rule on grounds that ethics should not be considered on a piecemeal basis.

This Democratic scenario got rave reviews from most Republicans. Senators like to be on record against earmarks while still enjoying them. The problem is that DeMint and his fellow Republican first-termer, Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, just won’t let the issue rest. Amid thundering silence from the GOP leadership after Durbin’s objection, Coburn declared on the Senate floor: “I would remind my colleagues that we don’t have a higher favorable rating than the president at this time . . . and the reason we don’t is the very reason we just saw. . . . It’s a sad day in the Senate because we’re playing games with the American public.” . . . This is no Democrat-vs.-Republican partisan struggle. The word in the Republican cloakroom was that a GOP senator would derail the DeMint rule if the Democrats did not. The Republican leadership is not enthralled with DeMint and Coburn, and would like them to go away. They won’t. They are determined to bring into the open who sponsors and who benefits from earmarks.

Read the whole thing. It’s not like the Republicans were good on this when they had the majority. But the Democrats did promise to end the “culture of corruption” and all. . . .

DANNY GLOVER HAS MORE on the “secret hold” that wasn’t — exactly — a secret hold:

While bloggers may be wrong on parliamentary procedure, they appear to be right on the money in assuming that some Republican lawmaker — and perhaps the Senate Republican leadership — doesn’t like yet another transparency bill and may even be working to keep it from seeing action. . . .

I entered this fray as a journalist, not as an activist for or against the particular bill in question. I just wanted to ask a question and get an answer. That didn’t happen. With me at least, Don Stewart chose spin over transparency, and I’m not happy about it.

So to all of you bloggers out there, I wholeheartedly endorse the underlying message of this campaign against a non-hotlined, secret, non-hold objection: Keep calling your senators and demanding answers. I don’t care whether you’re doing it because you’re more interested in journalism (like me) or campaign finance activism. Just do it — and don’t let anyone stonewall you.

Read the whole thing. And read this from Mark Tapscott, too:

That explanation is true, as far as it goes, but it carefully excludes mention of three significant facts. First, the objection stopped the bill’s advance. Didn’t kill it but put it on hold for now. Second, the identity of the objection GOP senator was not made public.

I’m just an out-of-town rube, but that sure sounds like a “hold” that is “secret” to me.

The third fact ignored in the Senate GOP rationalization is this: Feinstein’s proposal is a no-brainer if you believe in transparency in government but there is a history of GOP opposition to it. That is why the proposal got nowhere in the Senate when the GOP had the majority.

The way to settle the argument here is simple: Disclose the identity of the object[ing] GOP senator who can then explain why his or her procedural argument had to be made behind a cloak of anonymity. It would also be helpful to know what possible objection there could be to having Senate campaign finance reports be made public electronically, just as they are by everybody else required to file them.

Sounds fair to me.

BLOGGING FROM THE RED ZONE: Michael Totten reports from Kirkuk: “Kirkuk’s terrorists are, my Kurdish hosts explained, mostly Baathists, not Islamists. Their racist ideology casts Kurds and Turkmens as the enemy. They’re boxed in on all sides, though, and in their impotent rage murder fellow Arabs by the dozens and hundreds. They have, in effect, strapped suicide belts around their entire community while their more peaceful Kurdish and Turkmen neighbors shudder and fight to keep the Baath in its box.”

He’s supported by reader donations, so if you like his work, hit the tipjar.

UPDATE: Also in Iraq, Richard Miniter reports on Al Qaeda’s protection racket.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A lot of readers think that this is the important paragraph from Michael’s piece:

Most Americans have soured on the war and want out. I was once optimistic myself, but I no longer am. I can’t help but notice, though, that those I’ve spoken to who actually live in Iraq are more confident and less fatalistic.

Well, like I always say, read the whole thing! I can’t excerpt it all, you know, or, er, it wouldn’t be an “excerpt,” now would it?

GEORGE WILL ON LOWERING THE DRINKING AGE: Raising the drinking age was a major betrayal of federalism on the part of the Reagan Administration. It should be undone.

More here: “When it comes to alcohol, the United States is more like Indonesia, Mongolia, and Palau than the rest of the world: It is one of just four countries that requires people to be at least 21 years old to buy booze. The only countries with stiffer laws are Islamic ones.”

IN THE MAIL: Steven Landsburg’s new book, More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics.

Please stay safe out there!

A FLAG FOR A TERRAFORMED MARS: At Popular Science.

“SOCIAL CATASTROPHE:” “The blood of the victims of the ‘next one’ is on the hands of everyone in the decision-making chain at NBC for this utterly inexcusable decision.”

UPDATE: A defense of NBC.

THE KILLER IN THE LECTURE HALL: An interesting piece by Barbara Oakley in The New York Times:

Still, the Virginia Tech shootings have already led to calls for all sorts of changes: gun control, more mental health coverage, stricter behavior rules on campuses. Yes, in a perfect world, there would be no guns, no mental illness and no Cho Seung-Huis. But the world is very imperfect. Consider that Britain’s national experiment with gun-free living is proving to be a disaster, with violent and gun crime rates soaring.

In other words, most of the broad social “lessons” we are being told we must learn from the Virginia Tech shootings have little to do with what allowed the horrors to occur. This is about evil, and about how our universities are able to deal with it as a literary subject but not as a fact of life. Can administrators and deans really continue to leave professors and other college personnel to deal with deeply disturbed students on their own, with only pencils in their defense?

(Via Dr. Helen). Read the whole thing. Is it just me, or is the NYT oped page getting more open-minded?

HARRY REID ON THE SUPREME COURT’S ABORTION RULING:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) was among those who denounced yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling upholding the Federal Partial Birth Abortion Act. Commenting on the decision, Reid said “A lot of us wish that Alito weren’t there and O’Connor were there,” indicating his desire that there has been a fifth vote to invalidate the statute, as Justice O’Connor had provided the fifth vote to invalidate Nebraska’s partial-birth abortion ban in Stenberg v. Carhart.

What is curious about Reid’s statement, as NPR and some news outlets have noted, is not Reid’s criticism of Alito — Reid opposed Alito’s confirmation — but the fact that Reid supported, and voted for, the federal statute upheld in yesterday’s decision. . . .

So, despite his repeated support of legislative restrictions on abortion, Reid’s latest comment suggests that he believes the Supreme Court’s decision was regrettable and wrongly decided, and that a law that he supported is unconstitutional. To me, the latter is of greater concern. Call me old fashioned, but I believe that if a member of the Senate believes a law is unconstitutional, he or she should vote against it.

As noted, however, Reid is hardly alone in this regard. This kind of thing may explain why Congress’s approval numbers are so low.

UPDATE: Yes, there’s also Bush and campaign finance reform. As I’ve said before, that represented a betrayal of his oath.

AN UNDERGROUND TUNNEL BETWEEN RUSSIA AND ALASKA? Now there’s an engineering project for you. Hard to believe there’d be sufficient traffic to justify it, but . . . .

UPDATE: Stephen Gordon at The Speculist thinks that there would be enough traffic. Problem is, it’s a long way from anywhere. It’s nice to connect Siberia and Alaska — making it, as Phil Bowermaster notes, possible to drive from Paris, Texas to Paris, France. But Alaska itself is a long way from anywhere, and there aren’t even rail and road connections to the Bering Strait areas where the tunnel would go.

NBC AND THE CHO VIDEO: Huge roundup at BoingBoing.

WALTER SHAPIRO: Repeal the Second Amendment. This approach is at least more honest than the usual one of just wishing it away.

UPDATE: Jeff Soyer’s ready to call a whole constitutional convention.

IS FRED THOMPSON IN? Note this observation: “The money is out there. He has plenty of time to collect it. Even if he waits until Labor Day, he will have announced 2 months before GWB did in 1999.” And with Internet fundraising — where I suspect Thompson would do very well — he has even more room, I think.

TERRY HEATON: Say goodbye to the pageview as an ad metric.

WARNINGS IGNORED: “Cho (whose full name is pronounced joh sung-wee) appears first to have alarmed the noted Virginia Tech poet Nikki Giovanni in a creative writing class in fall 2005, Giovanni said. . . . Days later, seven of Giovanni’s 70 or so students showed up for a class. She asked them why the others didn’t show up and was told that they were afraid of Cho. ‘Once I realized my class was scared, I knew I had to do something,’ she said.”

But not much happened. (Which is, sadly, typical). Giovanni is pretty tough — she’s from Knoxville and I know her slightly — and if she was alarmed, there was something to be alarmed about.

TENNESSEE MOVES TO ALLOW GUNS IN PUBLIC BUILDINGS: “In a surprise move, a House panel voted today to repeal a state law that forbids the carrying of handguns on property and buildings owned by state, county and city governments — including parks and playgrounds. ‘I think the recent Virginia disaster — or catastrophe or nightmare or whatever you want to call it — has woken up a lot of people to the need for having guns available to law-abiding citizens,’ said Rep. Frank Niceley, R-Strawberry Plains.”

WHAT’S A BARREL SHROUD? Rep. Carolyn McCarthy admits that she has no idea, even though it’s banned by her own “assault weapons” legislation. Follow the link for amusing video.

UPDATE: SayUncle offers McCarthy some technical education: “BTW, these are also known by their more common name: Handguards.”

Sounds scary!

CATHY YOUNG ON PRISON RAPE:

Shortly after the Enron scandal broke in 2001, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer declared that he would love to personally escort the company’s CEO “to an eight-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, ‘Hi, my name is Spike, honey.’ ” The negative reaction compelled Lockyer to offer a tepid apology in a letter to the Los Angeles Times, explaining that he had gotten carried away in righteous anger and pointing to the initiatives he had undertaken to curb prison rape.

The unusual thing about this incident was not that Lockyer made a crude joke about prison rape. It’s that he caught flak for it. While jokes about male-on-female rape are widely viewed as taboo in this feminist age, male-on-male rape in prison is a perfectly acceptable and common subject of humor on late-night comedy shows, in movies, and even in TV commercials. . . .

At present, it is very difficult—virtually impossible in some states—for inmates who have been raped to collect damages from the prison system. Guards who neglect or even condone inmate-on-inmate assaults run virtually no risk of punishment. Other serious measures to combat prison rape would include both “conservative” solutions (stricter prisoner supervision) and “liberal” ones (less overcrowding).

Even lower-end estimates given by correctional organizations suggest that 20,000 to 40,000 inmates are sexually assaulted in American prisons every year. Those are figures no civilized society should accept.

Read the whole thing. More on this subject here and in the linked posts.

A LOOK AT EMERGENCY COMMUNICATIONS in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings. Still not working as they should be, a lesson we should have learned after 9/11 and Katrina.

Some related thoughts here.

I’M WATCHING JOHN KERRY on Kudlow right now and he’s saying that further gun control is impractical. I wonder if he will run again?

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT, at the University of Rhode Island. FIRE is on the case.

VIRGINIA POSTREL concludes that she’s a slut.

AN INTERVIEW WITH RON PAUL.

A DEFENSE OF “SWIFTBOATING.”

CAN AMERICA TRUST THE BBC?

Probably not.