THE POWER OF BLOGS. Beating out football!

BOYS JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN.

JIM GERAGHTY: “When the campaigns start attracting larger entourages, it should be fun to see who’s calling for the most stringent restrictions on CO2 emissions, and then to calculate which candidates are actually generating the most emissions during their campaign by flying around the country.”

HAPPINESS IS A WARM MACHINE GUN? Actually, a warm machine gun is one that has beeen fired, and given the price of ammo that could be grounds for unhappiness. I took my advanced constitutional law seminar to a shooting range a few years back (we were studying the right to bear arms) and rented an MP5 for the students to shoot. It’s only a submachinegun, but I picked up the ammo tab and it was over 200 bucks. But they enjoyed it. So maybe happiness is a warm machine gun so long as someone else is paying for the ammunition. . . .

UPDATE: Reader Jim Hogue emails:

Your comments about the MP-5 brought back some memories, both fond and not so. I lugged an MP-5(A3, I think, it had an retractable stock) around when I was in Mogadishu, Somalia during operation “Restore Hope.” I carried it while on counterintelligence collection trips throughout the neighborhoods near the airport.

I loved the versatility and lightweight. It was easier than a M-16 to maneuver inside a HUMVEE and It shot the same ammo as my M-9 pistol and, unlike M-16 A1 rounds at the time, would ricochet nicely down a dark ally meaning you didn’t have to expose yourself if you needed to return fire.

It had a three round burst selector, which is really all you need. Firing fully automatic used up ammo fast and should only be used if you’re within 10 yds of whoever is shooting at you. That’s WAAY closer than I ever wanted to be!!

I carried three spare magazines including one magazine connected to the magazine currently loaded. The ammo was much heavier than M-16 ammo and that restricted how much we could carry (more was always better!) plus most of the 9MM ammo was meant for pistols and therefore we didn’t take as much of the 9MM as the M-16 ammo in our deployment kits.

The MP-5 was easy to clean and the corrosive salt-water environment coupled with high humidity in Mogadishu meant cleaning was required almost every day.

It was not meant for long firefights, it mainly provided significant short-range firepower to permit you to withdraw from whatever mess you had stumbled into.

I’ve never particularly enjoyed full-auto fire myself, but some people do. Interestingly, when I took my class to the range it was the women students who seemed to enjoy shooting the MP5 on full auto the most.

TIGERHAWK: “If I were a petty man, I and my anonymous source would be bitter that the Post did not acknowledge whence this story came. However, filled as I am with the milk of human kindness, I am merely delighted to have participated in a small but entertaining national political story.”

FRAUD at the National Reconnaissance Office?

JIM LINDGREN looks at historical revisionism regarding spat-upon veterans: “Contrary to Lembcke’s claims, I quite easily found many accounts published in the 1967-1972 period claiming spitting on servicemen. . . . On the issues raised by Professor Lembcke, I have to say that I’ll take the world of Congressional Medal of Honor winners and Pulitzer-Prize winning journalists for the New York Times and Washington Post over the professor’s armchair speculations–especially since many of the former actually witnessed the events they described, while the professor appears not to have made a serious attempt to review the available evidence before publishing his book.” Lindgren has debunked bogus history before, of course.

DAVID BERNSTEIN: “Has the Bush II administration appointed any conservative judges with significant libertarian sympathies? If not, why not?”

AUSTIN BAY looks ahead to springtime in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, here’s a StrategyPage look at what’s going on in Iraq.

A LOOK AT THAILAND’S MUSLIM INSURGENCY: “The level of killing has gone up to over two people a day, minor by Iraqi standards, but still the most lethal conflict in Southeast Asia, bar none; and it has the potential to grow dramatically in 2007.”

HEH: “While I agree with Don Imus that there’s ‘something wrong with’ Chris Matthews, I’m amused to see that no one pointed out the obvious. Imus isn’t upset about the F-bomb on his show. He’s upset because he owns a ranch.”

ACTION ALERT: Stop taking yourselves so seriously!

Way back in 2002, Justin Sodano wrote:

Methinks that the blogging community is starting to get a little too big for its britches. Yes, blogging’s more popular than ever. Yes, some of you are getting lots and lots of attention (even me, for a brief period).

But everyone needs to calm down, take a step back, and realize that we are all just typing words into a computer. We’re not saving the world.

Still true today.

UPDATE: Indeed: “It’s hard to remember when so many had so much to say about so few.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Succinct, as usual.

FROM SAIL TO STEAM IN THE NEWSROOM: “The newspaper industry has been in the grip of a multi-year perturbation that has few parallels to other industry-wide rapid evolutions. In the past I have compared it to the years in which the carriages pulled by horses gave way to motor cars, but that is not the best analogy as one industry died as another rose. The better analogy for newspapers is the transition from sail to steam among ships, especially navies.”

“Pinch” Sulzberger agrees:

Given the constant erosion of the printed press, do you see the New York Times still being printed in five years?

“I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either,” he says.

Sulzberger is focusing on how to best manage the transition from print to Internet.

“The Internet is a wonderful place to be, and we’re leading there,” he points out.

The Times, in fact, has doubled its online readership to 1.5 million a day to go along with its 1.1 million subscribers for the print edition.

Sulzberger says the New York Times is on a journey that will conclude the day the company decides to stop printing the paper. That will mark the end of the transition. It’s a long journey, and there will be bumps on the road, says the man at the driving wheel, but he doesn’t see a black void ahead.

I hope that he’s able to pull it off, though his record to date does not inspire confidence.

BAD NEWS FOR THE REPUBLICANS:

When reporters are openly describing, without any sense of remorse, how the Democrats have gamed them into pinning blame squarely on the Republicans, you are definitely not winning the PR contest.

On the other hand, when reporters are willing to do that, it’s pretty hard to win the PR contest.

AIR AMERICA FIRE SALE: The Smoking Gun has the documents.

CONFRONTING THE REAL WORLD, at Harvard. Just proof that learning can take place anywhere.

TOM MAGUIRE is providing saturation coverage of the Libby trial.

IF YOU’RE GOING TO A GLOBAL WARMING SHINDIG, IT SHOULD AT LEAST BE IN A hybrid SUV, shouldn’t it? I mean, if it’s good enough for me, it should be good enough for . . . .

Okay, I guess that doesn’t actually work.

UPDATE: Reader Ed Holston thinks this shouldn’t be getting publicity:

I’m afraid the conservative blogs are too far ahead of the news cycle: they are becoming corrective image consultants to the Democrats. Expect Pelosi to take a hybrid tomorrow. As with the Edwards campaign bloggers, the quick blog attention helps them corrects their missteps, well before the sympathetic MSM would ever begrudgingly get around to covering it.

Call it the Heisenblog Effect . . . .

KATHRYN JOHNSTON SHOOTING UPDATE:

The Fulton County district attorney will seek felony murder charges against at least one of the Atlanta police officers involved in a botched drug raid that resulted in the shooting death of an elderly woman, said the officer’s attorney. . . .

On Nov. 21, narcotics officers went to the home of Kathryn Johnston in southwest Atlanta to execute a “no knock” search warrant. Johnston was killed and the three officers were injured in a ensuing shootout.

“No knock” warrants are frequently issued so police can get inside before suspects can destroy or dispose of drugs. When the officers kicked in the door, the elderly woman apparently fired five shots from her own revolver.

Johnston’s friends and family members contended the woman, who kept the gun for her protection, was a feeble and frightened woman who rarely ventured outside after dark. And they say that she was never involved in any drug activity. Her family says she was 92, while authorities say she was 88.

Junnier later told federal investigators that officers had lied to a magistrate judge about sending a confidential informant to Johnston’s house to purchase drugs in order to get the warrant.

I’m okay on giving cops — and anyone else caught in a life-or-death situation through no fault of their own — the benefit of the doubt. But this life-or-death situation was the cops’ fault, for lying in order to get the warrant. Plus, I think that no-knock tactics should be reserved for cases where there’s a serious threat to life or limb.

MEGAN MCARDLE: “I’m not sure I understand the objections to mandatory vaccination for HPV.”

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh weighs in.

CLAUDIA ROSETT: The curious career of Maurice Strong.

Before the United Nations can save the planet, it needs to clean up its own house. And as scandal after scandal has unfolded over the past decade, from Oil for Food to procurement fraud to peacekeeper rape, the size of that job has become stunningly clear.

But any understanding of the real efforts that job entails should begin with a look at the long and murky career of Maurice Strong, the man who may have had the most to do with what the U.N. has become today, and still sparks controversy even after he claims to have cut his ties to the world organization.

From Oil for Food to the latest scandals involving U.N. funding in North Korea, Maurice Strong appears as a shadowy and often critically important figure.

Read the whole thing.

CRY ME A RIVER: Lawmakers revolt over long hours.

There’s a broadening bipartisan “uprising” to ditch the longer workweek among both lawmakers and staff, especially in the Senate, said a top Democratic Senate aide.

“It’s a grind,” said Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., who enjoys one of the easiest commutes to the Capitol from his home in Northern Virginia. “It’s a lot more stringent than people originally thought it would be.”

A visibly annoyed Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., agreed: “I just told (Reid) I won’t be back by 4:30” for the vote Monday, “even though I’m catching a 1:55 flight.”

Things are tough all over.

UPDATE: Not much sympathy at The Mudville Gazette. The troops also work long hours.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: The “Favor Factory” is open for business again! Mark Tapscott looks at the impending Congressional porkfest and comments:

Perhaps taxpayers should forward their own funding requests to Taylor. If you do, CC me. I’ll publish the “most worthy” ones here. Maybe we will even have a public vote on them to see which ones ought to be funded and which should be directed to File 13.

That will be more of a public debate than Congress typically gives the vast majority of earmarks.

Sadly, yes.

MORE REPORTING FROM BAGHDAD on what’s going on with the surge.

HEH: “As some people in this room are suddenly finding out, the alternative minimum tax is a way of declaring working people rich and raising their taxes.”