WHO CARES ABOUT THE PLANET? KOSSACKS STILL LAGGING:

Come on, you guys can beat InstaPundit if you try. There are supposed to be a lot more Kos readers, and surely they care about the planet. Right?

UPDATE: Reader Bradley Ems emails: “As PJ O’Rourke once said, everyone wants to save the world; no one wants to help mom with the dishes.”

A LOOK AT INKJET IMAGE PERMANENCE, or the lack thereof.

SNAKE-HANDLING CONGREGATIONALISTS for freedom.

WILLIAM JEFFERSON MYSTERY, SOLVED.

STILL MORE SCARBOROUGH.

INFORMATION WARFARE:

The days of the independent, neutral war correspondent, objectively reporting from a war’s front lines, are quickly coming to an end. In the future, a war correspondent will either effectively be soldier for one faction of a conflict, or he will literally not survive in the war zone. In today’s media age, the requirement for combatants to shape perceptions about the nature of a conflict, and the necessity of denying that ability to the enemy, are more crucial than firepower and logistics, the traditional measures of battlefield dominance. Successful media operations energize a faction’s supporters and demoralize its enemies. When effective, this is more important than squadrons of fighter-bombers or train-loads of assault rifles. Whether they like or not, journalists are in the army now.

You couldn’t tell it from their product. Well, I guess that depends on which army you mean . . .

A LOOK AT AIDS, AFRICA, AND THE ELECTIONS:

Bush didn’t just renew his historic initiative, he vastly expanded it. But unlike with the first five-year run of PEPFAR, this time he won’t be around to make good on his promises. That will fall to the next President. So if you think of yourself as a social-justice-loving sort of person, you should make damn sure that whoever you vote for has made clear that, on Africa, they’ll carry forward Bush’s legacy, rather than bringing us back to the dark days of Clintonian indifference.

If that happens, it will be because of personal belief, not politics. As Bush’s history makes clear, his support on this issue has done nothing for him politically, as not enough people care.

TURKISH TROOPS in Iraq.

UPDATE: Huge roundup on the subject here.

IN THE MAIL: Joshua Kurlantzick’s Charm Offensive: How China’s Soft Power Is Transforming the World. He’s right about that, and the kinds of things that China is doing are things that we ought to be doing better, but that our bureaucracies (and in particular the State Department) aren’t very good at. Perhaps this book will draw some attention to that problem.

EVERYBODY’S A CRITIC: “I’d like to congratulate Mitt Romney on being the first to introduce a term from mathematical set theory into a presidential campaign… except that he plainly has no clue what ‘null set’ actually means. If he DID have any clue, he’d know to say ‘THE null set,’ not ‘A null set.'”

A JOE SCARBOROUGH ROUNDUP, from Howard Kurtz.

GOOD NEWS from Derek Lowe. “I’m very glad to announce that I’ve accepted an offer of a new research position. . . . It’s a bit unsettling for me to realize, though, how much my search was helped out by things that had no official connection to my old position – this blog, for one thing.” Not surprising, though.

A CONFESSION: In my entire life, I’ve never felt bad about my neck. That doesn’t make me a shallow person, does it?

UPDATE: I guess it’s part of the Zabar’s Zeitgeist!

TERRY HEATON 1, COMPUSA . . . 1. Why isn’t this just a victory for Heaton? Because when CompUSA treats a customer right, it wins, too.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Phony earmark reform:

Last December, victorious congressional Democrats pledged a one-year moratorium on all earmarks. New appropriations chairmen Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., and Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., issued a joint statement promising voters “there will be no congressional earmarks” until 2008 — and only after tough reforms were enacted.

But if you watch what they do instead of listen to what they say, it’s abundantly clear that just six months later, the earmark moratorium is already over. . . .

The cavalier way the new Democratic majority quickly abandoned its promise to “drain the swamp” was succinctly summed up by Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., earlier this week. In a frank admission to Examiner editors, Mikulski said she would continue to sponsor “smart earmarks” — with the term conveniently defined by her. But there’s nothing “smart” about tacking on billions of dollars in earmarks to phone-book-sized appropriations bills that bypass agency procurement rules, competitive bidding, congressional oversight and public scrutiny. As a Mikulski aide told The Examiner: “Federal funding is either competitive or an earmark, it can’t be both.”

The situation is no better on the House side where the Lower Rio Grande Valley Water Resources Conservation and Improvement Act of 2007 came to the floor Tuesday loaded with 14 earmarks for water projects throughout Texas. No names of the earmarks’ sponsors were included because, since the bill was considered under a suspension of the rules, the House reforms adopted in January didn’t apply.

I didn’t think it was possible for the Democrats to be worse in this regard than the GOP Congress was. Clearly, I suffered from a lack of imagination.

TODAY IS THE ANNIVERSARY OF D-DAY.

A WRAP-UP ON LAST NIGHT’S DEBATE, from Marc Ambinder.

FRED THOMPSON’S NEW WEBSITE, ImWithFred.com, is up and running.

According to the pollsters at Pew, he shows “broad popular appeal.”

POLITICALLY CORRECT WARFARE: “PC brigade ban pin-ups on RAF jets – in case they offend women and Muslims.”

UPDATE: Never mind. I withdraw any criticism. Apparently, they plan to replace the nose art with the London Olympics logo, thus sending any enemies into convulsions caused by either epilepsy, or aesthetic revulsion. It’s brilliant! Er, but does it pass the Geneva Conventions?

DESPITE TED KENNEDY’S BEST EFFORTS, wind power is booming: “The U.S. is the fastest growing global market for wind power, according to the Energy Department’s first annual report on U.S wind power installations. U.S. wind power capacity jumped 27 percent in 2006, the largest incremental jump on record and the highest incremental capacity in the world, the DoE study found.”

Wind will never be a really major source, but it’s a nontrivial one.

IF IT QUACKS LIKE A DUCK:

Kopel told me that he thinks conservatives should keep the conservative media honest.

But charged with being deceptive, O’Reilly exploded, falsely accusing Kopel of being a “secular progressive.” Not only that, but O’Reilly told Kopel to shut up and quit filibustering.

O’Reilly’s modus operandi on this particular program seemed to be, “Don’t talk while I’m interrupting.” He looked completely ridiculous. . . .

All of this followed O’Reilly’s claim that if Kopel were not a secular progressive, then he, O’Reilly, was Donald Duck. . . .

It was to O’Reilly’s credit that he had Kopel on his show, and he thanked Kopel at the end of the interview, after insulting him. However, there was absolutely no excuse for O’Reilly to have behaved this badly on the air. It was an embarrassing moment for O’Reilly and the Fox News Channel.

Donald Duck is a frequently-blustering type with an excessively high opinion of himself. . . .

RIAA CHARGED WITH extortion and conspiracy.

A LOOK AT THE NANNY STATE — and that “pilfering” business, by the way, happens a lot.

ILYA SOMIN LOOKS AT THE IMPACT OF passing the Equal Rights Amendment: “If enacted, the ERA is likely to have a greater impact than many expect.”

CRIMINALIZATION OF NAPPING? Well, new news stories suggest there’s more than was originaly reported: ” A teenager had been up all night drinking at a party before coming home to baby-sit her stepsister and another toddler, who both wandered outside and drowned in a nearby pond while the teen slept, state police said Tuesday.”

So it’s not so much napping here, despite what the initial reports said.