ALIENS AT ROSWELL: A deathbed confession.

PIRATES!

RESEARCHING GLOBAL WARMING at the edge of outer space.

TIM BLAIR IS UNIMPRESSED WITH “LIVE EARTH:”

Consider the vast carbon footprint of Live Earth, during which the world’s most indulgent people – rock stars – will demand that their followers pledge to “take personal action to help solve the climate crises by reducing my own C02 pollution as much as I can.”

Has Live Earth performer Keith Urban sold his Bentleys yet? (Actually, merely selling those 12-cylinder babies won’t reduce C02 emissions; he must destroy them.) I’ve been trying to come up with a violently destructive Gaia-raping stunt for us to participate in on Live Earth day, but it is literally impossible for even several thousand non-millionaires to match Live Earth’s own level of eco-vandalism while remaining within their means and the law.

We’ve been out-carboned by Big Environmentalism.

And you can tell that Tim is unhappy about that.

THERE’S A FREE KEITH HENSON PETITION.

STEVE CHAPMAN: “Did the Supreme Court ‘Roll Back’ Brown v. Board of Education?“

FITZMAS: NOT WITH A BANG, BUT WITH A WHIMPER. Bush spares Libby from Prison.

My prediction: Bush will rise in the polls as estranged conservatives warm to him in light of lefty indignation.

UPDATE: Big roundup at Hot Air.

And Orin Kerr comments: “I find Bush’s action very troubling because of the obvious special treatment Libby received. President Bush has set a remarkable record in the last 6+ years for essentially never exercising his powers to commute sentences or pardon those in jail. His handful of pardons have been almost all symbolic gestures involving cases decades old, sometimes for people who are long dead. Come to think of it, I don’t know if Bush has ever actually used his powers to get one single person out of jail even one day early. If there are such cases, they are certainly few and far between. So Libby’s treatment was very special indeed.”

Kinda like the veto — when you use it so rarely, every application seems iffy.

FOR EVERY PUBLIC OPINION POLL, a new social program!

A ROUNDUP OF London bombing news.

JOHN FUND:

Last week a federal district judge found direct evidence that the political machine in Noxubee County, Miss., had discriminated against voters with the intent to infringe their rights and that “these abuses have been racially motivated.”

Among the abuses catalogued by Judge Tom Lee were the paying of notaries public to visit voters and illegally mark their absentee ballots, manipulation of the registration rolls, importation of illegal candidates to run for county office, and publication of a list of voters, classified by race, who might have their ballots challenged. The judge criticized state political officials for being “remiss” in addressing the abuses. The U.S. Justice Department, which sued Noxubee officials under the Voting Rights Act, has called conditions there “the most extreme case of racial exclusion seen by the [department’s] Voting Section in decades.”

Read the whole thing. We keep hearing that this sort of thing doesn’t happen nowadays, but John Fund has done an excellent job of demonstrating that it still does. You can listen to our podcast interview with Fund on the topic right here.

MICHAEL YON EMAILS: “Baqubah has gone quiet. Very little fighting. There might be more to come, but overall the people have turned against al Qaeda and are pointing them out day by day. The people are pointing out the bombs. Baqubah received its first food shipment in 10 months just a few days ago, even while light fighting was still on. I was there for the food distribution and am writing a dispatch on it. The primary object now is to start to restore a sense of normalcy in the city. Remember Ramadi? That crazy city of death and fighting? Writers hardly want to go there any more because it’s quiet. I am very curious if Baqubah will go that way. So far so good. There are serious sectarian issues here in Diyala Province, but with al Qaeda on defense instead of offense, the people in Baqubah have a chance to do what those in Ramadi and other cities are doing: reclaim their lives.”

Sounds good. Let’s hope things continue in that vein.

AT KAUSFILES, paranoia is in full flower. But not without reason!

IN THE MAIL: Robert Novak’s The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington.

GOING 100 TIMES FASTER with laser hard drives? Soon, but not yet.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: The Examiner editorializes:

Look closely at Capitol Hill today, and you will see a crumbling fortress manned by a motley collection of old bulls and eager young back benchers, most of whom seem blindly determined to fight to the last earmarked tax dollar against the citizens steadily surrounding them.

As the encirclement tightens amid increasingly fervent demands that the defenders give up and let the sun shine in, its list of grievances about earmarks keeps growing longer: . . .

What is especially distressing is that these are only a handful of the more than 32,000 earmarks House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., says his panel has received in recent months from members of the House from both parties.

Obviously, Congress didn’t get the message last November, so the encirclement will only get tighter.

Let’s hope. Read the whole thing for further examples.

DESMOND LACHMAN:

As sub-prime lending problems at Bear Sterns, the venerable Wall Street investment bank, now come to light, one has to be struck by the positive spin that market analysts continue to put on the looming problems in the US sub-prime mortgage market. More disturbing still is the seemingly sanguine attitude and policy passivity of the Federal Reserve in the face of the mortgage market’s present unraveling.

For despite the Feds’s recent sad experience in 2001with the bursting of the equity price bubble, the Federal Reserve now remains more concerned with inflation moving out of its 1-2 percent comfort zone than with the real possibility of a sub-prime induced financial market meltdown. If it indeed turns out that the Fed was yet again late to begin easing monetary policy in the wake of the bursting of another asset price bubble, history will hardly judge the Fed kindly.

I have no idea whether we should be more worried about inflation or deflation. But we’ve had an unusually long run of prosperity, which probably means that we’re overdue for a decline.

MASS BUDGET TROUBLE for Orion?