LOADS OF NIFONG NEWS at K.C. Johnson’s place.

And another case of false charges closer to home: “A Campbell County man spent 63 days behind bars falsely accused of murdering his two-year-old daughter. . . . The autopsy found no evidence of any prescription drugs in Tabitha’s system. Instead, the cause of death was a bronchial asthma attack. ‘All they had to do was follow their own advice and wait for the autopsy,’ says Coltharp’s attorney, Greg Isaacs. He is representing Coltharp in a possible lawsuit.”

ADAM GROVES interviews Lamar Alexander.

LOOKS AT THE SITUATION IN IRAQ, from StrategyPage and Victor Davis Hanson.

Also from Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.

And from some Marines in Iraq.

SEPARATED AT BIRTH? Wow, this is really amazing.

TOM LANTOS DENOUNCES GERHARD SCHROEDER AND JACQUES CHIRAC.

“I am so glad that the era of Jacques Chirac and Chancellor Schroeder in Germany is now gone,” Lantos said to applause.

He said when the United States asked Schroeder to support its decision to go to war in Iraq “he told us where to go.”

“I referred to him as a political prostitute, now that he’s taking big checks from (Russian President Vladimir) Putin. But the sex workers in my district objected, so I will no longer use that phrase,” Lantos said.

After leaving office in 2005 Schroeder became chairman of the North Europe Gas Pipeline, which is 51 percent owned by the Russian state natural gas company Gazprom.

Ouch. And heh.

IRAN MOVES TO execute porn stars.

MORE ON PELOSI AND THE JETS: “Pentagon officials are bracing for a fight with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) over her desire to allow lawmakers’ adult children to tag along on taxpayer-funded travel for free. Pelosi wants them to be able to fill the role of lawmakers’ spouses when the latter are unable to make a trip because of health issues or work commitments.”

Can’t these people fly commercial? Plus this:

Pentagon aides did not respond to requests for comment.

But taxpayer watchdog groups and ethics advocates said they were surprised Pelosi would seek more perks for members.

“One of the things she was praised for when she came in was her sweeping reforms on gifts and travel,” said Craig Holman of Public Citizen. “It is very disheartening if she is, in fact, backsliding on this.”

Backsliding seems to be the big theme of this Congress.

UPDATE: Reader Glenn Thomson writes:

Shouldn’t most of the ‘adult children’ of lawmakers have real jobs? I can’t imagine most of the people I’ve worked with being able to drop what they’re doing and fly somwhere to help Mom/Dad with business.

“Real jobs.” Such naivete is refreshing.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Looks like a significant victory over pork, judging by this from Rep. Jeff Flake:

Republican Congressman Jeff Flake, who represents Arizona’s Sixth District, today was pleased that House Democratic Leadership has ceded to Republican complaints regarding House Appropriations Chairman David Obey’s plan to add earmarks to spending bills only after the House has passed the bills.

The agreement, as understood, calls for Democrats to move ahead this week on two spending bills not traditionally vehicles for egregious earmarks, homeland security appropriations and military construction appropriations, under earmark reform rules passed last Congress. This will allow for a point of order on earmarks that are air-dropped into conference reports.

The House Appropriations Committee will attach earmarks to the remaining appropriations bills before consideration on the House floor, which will allow Members to attempt to strike out individual earmarks.

In other words, the attempt to do this under the table has failed. The good news in this campaign is that they’ve become embarrassed enough about pork to try to hide it — a huge change since fall of 2005 when PorkBusters got started — and that they’re also unable to pull off the most egregious efforts at hiding it. There’s still a long way to go in achieving transparency, but this is no small thing.

UPDATE: I’m hearing that there may be some backsliding on this deal, so stay tuned.

THE ENFORCER: “In a move that has executives from movie studios and record labels grinning from ear to ear, AT&T has announced that it will develop and deploy technology that will attempt to keep pirated content off its network.”

PETER ROBINSON INTERVIEWS FRED THOMPSON. It goes beyond the kinds of things covered on Leno.

UPDATE: Fred Thompson is blogging, too. Say what you will, but he clearly gets the new media.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Somehow, this post manages to be both “breathless” and “solemn” at the same time! How do I do it? Ah, that’s the secret that eludes the lesser lights, isn’t it?

MORE: A look at who’s blogging in the Presidential race.

RASMUSSEN: “Just 20% of American voters want Congress to try and pass the immigration reform bill that failed in the Senate last week. . . . Sixty-nine percent (69%) of voters would favor an approach that focuses ‘exclusively on securing the border and reducing illegal immigration.'” I think it’s fair to say that supporters didn’t make the case.

PORKBUSTERS GOT MENTIONED ON THE HOUSE FLOOR TODAY:

ANOTHER ASSASSINATION IN LEBANON. Michael Totten comments: “Those who ‘engage’ tyrants for a living need to pay more attention. The Syrian regime has had the same modus operandi almost as long as I have been alive. It’s time to catch up. . . . It’s amazing what third-rate fly-blown dictatorships get away with these days.”

They get away with it because we have a political culture that makes stopping them seem, somehow, unthinkable.

WHY THE RUSH ON THE IMMIGRATION BILL? I don’t know, but speculation abounds. Hard to believe that enforcement could make this much difference, but if it did that would certainly undercut one argument — that there’s nothing else we can do — for the bill.

AUSTIN BAY TALKS TO Dr. David Kilcullen — Senior Counterinsurgency Adviser to Gen. Petraeus — on this week’s Blog Week in Review.

JAMES LILEKS ON DOWNTOWN BEAUTIFICATION: “If you’ve ever visited one of those sad deindustrialized cities with a moribund core, you know how they tried to bring the downtown back: banners and trees. If not trees, then flower baskets hanging from ornamental light fixtures. But certainly banners. If you hang something from every block that says History District or Pennsylvania’s Culture: On the Grow or Home of the 2003 Upper West New York Jazz Festival people will come back.”

He’s right that that doesn’t work. But downtown Knoxville has gotten better — the Insta-Daughter and I had lunch downtown on Market Square today (her idea) — and it was a bustling scene. Knoxville tried the trees, banners, brick-paved sidewalk stuff. But what mostly worked was businesses starting on their own, and people moving downtown. There’s now a booming downtown scene, but it’s pretty muched happened spontaneously, not because of the city’s various development schemes, which have been going on since Nixon was President. But one thing has made a difference: Parking! It’s easy and cheap to park, and that’s key.

REPUBLICANS MAKING GAINS ON YOUTUBE: But Democrats are still ahead.

“ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM” AT THE AP? Let’s start with a little accountability on the part of journalism, okay? “You would think that given the glut of opinion, ‘mainstream media’ organizations like the AP would emphasize what they are particularly good at, namely impartial reporting. But maybe they weren’t that good at it to begin with.”

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: People are still fighting over earmarks:

The congressional spending season began with a blowup over earmarks in the House yesterday, as the first bill to reach a vote prompted a White House veto threat and scores of amendments from Republicans furious with Democrats’ handling of pet-project spending in the measures.

Debate on the $36 billion homeland security bill, which would fund the Federal Emergency Management Agency, border security and counterterrorism measures, bogged down last night as Republicans pushed scores of amendments aimed at banning the use of counterterrorism money for designer handbags, puppet shows and other programs included in the legislation.

Hard to see why anyone would want to oppose those. And Nancy Pelosi has a cheery suggestion:

“Why don’t we just leave this room today forgetting the word ‘earmark’?” suggested Pelosi. “This is a way for . . . members to come together, sometimes in a bipartisan way, to have the Congress of the United States determine some of what is in the appropriations bills instead of just leaving it up to the White House.”

Indeed! It would have been nice, of course, if the Republicans had been against this stuff before the last election. Heck, they might still be in the majority . . . .

MR. WIZARD has died.

JOHN KASS ON JOURNALISM AND HATE CRIME: “Why journalists play down black-on-white crime would take more than a few columns to answer. We don’t want to give comfort to white racists. It also may have something to do with our politics. . . . Hate crimes and the lack of hate-crime status depend on the politics of the day.”

RAND SIMBERG ON the Law of the Sea Treaty and the Moon Treaty. One distinction is that the LoST gives the United States a few things that we want, while the Moon Treaty gives us basically nothing.

BUSTED: “Indonesian police have arrested the alleged leader of a South East Asian terror group blamed for the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings.”

IMPEACH BUSH! “This is the last straw.”

RAZORBLOGGING: The Braun Pulsonic Shaver gets a review from Popular Mechanics, who call it an “exciting moment for grooming.”