TOM SMITH: “Freedom isn’t free, and if you had any doubt whether the first amendment was free, I offer you Michael Moore.”

Not free, but lucrative for some people.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: More and more news outlets seem to be noticing the Democrats’ disappointing performance on pork:

When the new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives passed one of its first spending bills, funding the Energy Department for the rest of 2007, it proudly boasted that the legislation contained no money earmarked for lawmakers’ pet projects and stressed that any prior congressional requests for such spending “shall have no legal effect.”

Within days, however, lawmakers including Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) began directly contacting the Energy Department. They sought to secure money for their favorite causes outside of the congressional appropriations process — a practice that lobbyists and appropriations insiders call “phonemarking.” . . .

The number of earmarks, in which lawmakers target funds to specific spending projects, exploded over the past decade from about 3,000 in 1996 to more than 13,000 in 2006, according to the Congressional Research Service. Most earmarks made it into appropriations bills or their accompanying conference reports without identifying their sponsors. Upon taking control of Congress after November’s midterm elections, Democrats vowed to try to halve the number of earmarks, and to require lawmakers to disclose their requests and to certify that the money they are requesting will not benefit them.

But the new majority is already skirting its own reforms. . . . “Absolutely nothing has changed,” said the Center for Defense Information’s Winslow T. Wheeler, a Senate appropriations and national security aide who worked for both Democrats and Republicans over three decades before stepping down in 2002. “The rhetoric has changed but not the behavior, and the behavior has gotten worse in the sense that while they are pretending to reform things, they are still groveling in the trough.”

Meet the new boss, yada yada. Read the whole thing.

EVAN COYNE MALONEY has been getting a lot of publicity for his new documentary Indoctrinate U. Here’s a roundup.

And here, by the way, is our interview of Evan and his partner Stuart Browning, from the second Glenn & Helen Show ever.

FOUR GEOENGINEERING PLANS to fight global warming. Research is fine, but we should proceed very cautiously on deployment.

GEORGE W. BUSH, GREENHOUSE HERO!

U.S. carbon dioxide emissions dropped slightly last year even as the economy grew, according to an initial estimate released yesterday by the Energy Information Administration.

The 1.3 percent drop in CO{-2} emissions marks the first time that U.S. pollution linked to global warming has declined in absolute terms since 2001 and the first time it has gone down since 1990 while the economy was thriving. . . . In 2006 the U.S. economy grew 3.3 percent, a fact President Bush touted yesterday as he hailed the government’s “flash estimate” that the country’s carbon dioxide emissions dropped by 78 million metric tons last year.

With John Ashcroft protecting our civil liberties, and committed environmentalist George W. Bush tackling the greenhouse effect, things are just getting better and better!

UPDATE: Hey, it’s already working!

SAVING ENERGY WITH A SIX-STROKE GASOLINE/STEAM ENGINE. You don’t see that every day.

SAVING LIVES VIA FRANCHISING, in Africa.

LOTS MORE IMMIGRATION-BLOGGING FROM MICKEY KAUS: The best thing about this whole brouhaha, from my standpoint at least, is that Kaus has been on fire. I was hoping that he and Virginia Postrel would get into a back-and-forth on the subject, but you can’t have everything. And hey, there’s still hope.

BODY FARMS ARE springing up all over.

SECOND AMENDMENT UPDATE: Interesting article by historian Robert Churchill: Gun Regulation, the Police Power, and the Right to Keep Arms in Early America: The Legal Context of the Second Amendment.

SARKOZY AND IRAN: “French President Nicholas Sarkozy called Wednesday for sanctions on Iran to be tightened if the country does not adhere to the West’s demands to cease its nuclear agenda. . . . Sarkozy announced that France will join the official US-led struggle against head of the International Atomic Energy Agency Mohamed ElBaradei, who recommended that Iran be allowed to enrich uranium in some of its nuclear plants.”

ElBaradei doesn’t inspire confidence. But read the whole thing.

CONGRATULATIONS, It’s a boy, born to Mary Cheney and Heather Poe. We had a podcast interview with Mary a year ago; you can listen here.

A FRED THOMPSON RUN GETS praise from Thompson’s ex-girlfriend Lorrie Morgan.

As I’ve noted here before on several occasions, it pays to stay on good terms with your ex-girlfriends. Sometimes I even get blogging from them!

MIDWEST LUTHERANS LARGELY REJECT VIOLENCE: “By an almost two-to-one margin, Midwest Lutherans voiced solid opposition to decapitation, suicide bombing, and chemical warfare in a new comprehensive survey of their social attitudes. The Pew Research survey, conducted May 13-19, queried nearly 2,500 randomly selected Lutherans at flea markets and convenience stores across the Midwest. Interviews were conducted in High Plains Twang, Great Lakes Nasal and Flat Ohio Valley Bland.”

UPDATE: Fanatical Presbyterians in Australia! You can’t trust those folks.

MORE ON LEBANON FROM MICHAEL TOTTEN:

Trying to read the logic behind the last three car bombs is a little bit like reading tea leaves. But as someone named Triok pointed out in the comments, it may not be an accident that the first bomb was in a Christian area, the second bomb was in a Sunni area, and the third bomb was in a Druze area.

The overwhelming majority of Christians, Sunnis, and Druze are in the anti-Syrian coalition. And until this week, no bombs have exploded in Sunni or Druze areas since Syria’s withdrawal. Perhaps this is enough to discern a deliberate pattern, especially since the UN is gearing up to impose a tribunal against Syrian regime suspects for assassinating Rafik Hariri.

As Triok pointed out, no placement of bombs in Lebanon is ever random.

He’s got more.

GOOGLE IS buying FeedBurner for $100 million. Heck, I’d sell InstaPundit for half that!

UPDATE: “Pure evil.”

HERE’S A REVIEW OF THE DANGEROUS BOOK FOR BOYS (“What this title has going for it is an idea whose time has come. . . . Every library and home with kids really should have a copy.”), along with some suggestions for girls.

WRITE YOUR OWN “TWO AMERICAS” CAPTION! Note: Link is work-safe, but if you go beyond it to Fred Lapides’ GoodShit blog, well, there’ll be other stuff that isn’t.

SO YOU THINK HYBRIDS ARE just for environmentally conscious wimps like, er, me? Well, think again!

Plus, more on that air-powered car I mentioned the other day.

TIME: “Is al-Qaeda on the Run in Iraq?”

ATTRITION:

The Taliban’s much-vaunted spring offensive has stalled apparently due to lack of organisation after dozens of middle-ranking commanders were killed by British troops in the past year, according to military sources. The death last week of the key Taliban leader Mullah Dadullah at the hands of American special forces has harmed the Taliban’s morale to the point that local commanders are having to tell their troops to “remain professional” despite the loss.

After suffering more than 1,000 dead in battles with the Parachute Regiment and Royal Marines in the last year, the Taliban retired to regroup and re-equip last winter.

A spring offensive was ordered by the Taliban leadership based in Quetta, Pakistan, and was meant to be launched in late March. But a lack of mid-level commanders has meant that there has been little co-ordination to bring about the offensive.

Hey, I guess killing these guys does help. (Via Don Surber).

JODY WILLIAMS AND MIA FARROW: “Chinese oil companies fuel genocide in Darfur. It’s time for Americans to divest.”

SICKO UPDATE: Wagner James Au emails:

Glenn, I’m not sure anyone’s brought this up yet with Michael Moore’s *Sicko*, but one of the biggest costs on US health care is… people like Michael Moore: The World Bank has estimated the cost of obesity in the U.S. at 12 percent of the national health care budget… The Lewin Group examined the costs of fifteen (15) conditions causally related to obesity. They included: arthritis, breast cancer, heart disease, colorectal cancer, type 2 diabetes, endometrial cancer, end-stage renal disease, gallbladder disease, hypertension, liver disease, low back pain, renal cell cancer, obstructive sleep apnea, stroke and urinary incontinence… This method established the direct health care costs of obesity at $102.2 billion in 1999. [Indirect costs surely boost that figure even higher].

Maybe Moore’s next film can be called Downsize Me!

YEAH, THAT’LL WORK: Suing OPEC over high oil prices. The discovery process might be fun, though.

THOUGHTS ON “GROWING THE ‘RED’ BLOGOSPHERE,” which is, by the way, absolutely nothing like “hosting a ‘communist guest.'”