THEY’RE RUNNING AWAY WITH THEIR LITTLE CURLY TAILS BETWEEN THEIR LEGS: The Senate has just passed an Iraq withdrawal bill, which like the House bill was laden with pork to buy votes.

It’s a disgrace, but par for the course for this bunch.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, read this from Jules Crittenden.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ed Driscoll comments: “Not at all a surprise, of course. But very far removed from how they were actually elected in the first place.”

And Don Surber itemizes some of the pork and observes: “Disgusting is too nice a word for people who voted to send troops to Iraq in 2002, and less than 5 years later play political chicken with funding for those very troops.”

You don’t need a weathervane to know which way the wind’s blowing. Just a copy of the Senate voting record.

MORE: Bob Krumm looks at the bright side: “Perhaps President Bush will finally veto a pork-laden spending package.”

Heh. If he’d started doing that sooner, he probably wouldn’t be facing this problem now.

THE VALUE OF “world sympathy.”

AND WE HAVE A WINNER. What’s more, it’s neither Hillary nor George Allen.

BRANNON DENNING AND ED ZELINSKY debate the future of the Dormant Commerce Clause at the University of Pennsylvania Law Review’s PENNumbra site.

TERRIBLE NEWS FOR TONY SNOW: Cancer survivor G.M. Roper has thoughts.

UPDATE: Thoughts from the compassionate left at the Huffington Post. And not just in the comments.

MORE: Jim Treacher apologizes for his brutal honesty.

TONY BLAIR CALLS FOR A NO-FLY ZONE over Darfur.

JIM WEBB ON guns in D.C. “I’m not going to comment in any level in terms of how I provide for my own security.”

Lots of Americans feel the same way, but don’t get the same privileges. Webb could, and should, play a constructive role in addressing that disparity.

UPDATE: Much more here. Excerpt:

Webb said he has been in New Orleans since Friday and returned Monday night. He denied that he gave the weapon to Thompson. . . . Asked what support the senator was giving to his aide, Webb told FOX News, “We’re doing all we can.”

“I want to emphasize, first of all, that Phillip Thompson is a long-time friend. He’s a fine individual. … I have a tremendous amount of respect for him,” Webb told reporters. “I think this is one of those very unfortunate situations where, completely inadvertently, he took the weapon into the Senate yesterday.”

Handguns are illegal in Washington, D.C., but nearby Virginia allows residents to carry concealed handguns. Capitol Police rules allow members and their employees to bring a weapon onto Capitol grounds if it is unloaded and securely wrapped. In this case, it was allegedly neither.

Webb said he is a big supporter of the constitutional right to bear arms and thinks Virginia’s concealed handgun law is a “fair law.”

“Everyone here knows that I am a strong supporter of the Second Amendment, that I have had a permit to carry a weapon in Virginia for a long time,” he said.

So apparently the gun wasn’t Webb’s. Go figure. But, again, I think that Webb should take the lead in protecting those Second Amendment rights in Washington, D.C., over which Congress has authority. There’s also this from Webb:

“I believe that it’s important — it’s important for me, personally, and for a lot of people in the situation that I’m in, to be able to defend myself and my family,” Webb said. “Since 9/11 for people who are in government I think in general there has been an agreement that it’s a more dangerous time. Again, I’m not going to comment, again, with great specificity about how I defend myself, but I do feel that I have that right.”

Reader Christopher Fox emails: “Well, Senator, that might be your perception, but as far as I can tell, domestically speaking, we’ve lost around 3,000 civilians and 0 Senators to the post-9/11 dangers of which you speak. It’s a more dangerous time for all of us, and civilians seem to be shouldering the majority of that risk. So maybe we can, I don’t know, all get to carry unregistered firearms around wherever we like? No? Why not?”

Why not, indeed? Certainly Webb should take the lead in making it possible for ordinary Americans — not just “people who are in government” — to protect themselves as he does.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More thoughts at SayUncle. SayUncle notes that Webb didn’t actually deny that it was his gun, only that he gave it to Thompson.

U.S. VS IRAN IN IRAQ: A timeline.

MARY KATHARINE HAM saves the planet.

ERIC MULLER: “Monica Goodling has a valid basis for asserting the Fifth Amendment privilege.”

Not really my area of expertise, but he’s certainly no apologist for the Bush DoJ. As I’ve done before, I’ll just recommend my former colleague Peter W. Morgan’s The Undefined Crime of Lying to Congress: Ethics Reform and the Rule of Law, 86 Nw. U. L. Rev. 177 (1992), which explains the way in which the False Statements Act (18 U.S.C. 1001, which applies to statements made to any federal official, not just Congress) has been used and abused. Sadly, Morgan’s piece is not available on the web anywhere, as far as I can tell.

UPDATE: A contrary take from Orin Kerr.

“SENATE WAR BILL FEATURES $20B IN PORK.”

Pehaps they’ll add a double-secret withdrawal date.

IN THE MAIL: Christopher Buckley’s new novel, Boomsday. Judging by the blurb, it’s a sort of Atlas Shrugged for the post-Boomer generation:

With Boomsday looming as 77 million baby boomers get ready to retire and crash Social Security, Cassandra Devine, a sarcastic spin doctor by day and a ferocious blogger by night, calls for a revolution. Why should the under-35 crowd pay higher taxes to support the “Ungreatest Generation?” What have boomers done for anyone? Look at Cassandra’s heinous father. He absconded with her Yale tuition and convinced her to enlist, leading to her encounter with a land mine while escorting Massachusetts senator Randolph Jepperson. After going to jail for instigating anti-oldster riots at golf courses, Cass takes a cue from Jonathan Swift and offers her own outrageous “modest proposal.” With one eye on the White House and the other on tough and lovely Cass, blue-blood Jepperson decides to back her provocation. As Cass’s mensch of a boss observes, “The line dividing reality from absurdity in this country has finally disappeared.”

Well, that’s certainly true. . . .

JULES CRITTENDEN WANTS TO SELL MORON OFFSETS: I think demand may outstrip supply. Why Sean Penn alone could . . . . Oh, just read the whole thing.

SOME EXPENSIVE VOTES in the Senate.

JOHN MCCAIN DEFENDS MCCAIN-FEINGOLD, in this blogger video from his tourbus.

Loads more video here.

HOWARD KURTZ ON CABLE TV:

Anna Nicole was back in the news yesterday with the official finding that she died from an accidental overdose, and you could almost hear the groaning from television producers that there wasn’t a more controversial outcome.

The press conference by the thick-accented medical examiner — who almost seemed from central casting — could not be covered by the cable networks, of course, without a cascade of split-screen pictures of the onetime stripper shaking her booty for the cameras. If you banned that footage, I believe the coverage would drop by 80 percent.

At least.

NOT-SO-GREAT MOMENTS in education.

EMBRACE THE MACHINE: In the D.C. Examiner, I look at some technological breakthroughs I’d like to see.

MICKEY KAUS: “For now, please read through Rutten’s piece and ask yourself if he shows any sign of awareness that he and his distinguished LAT colleagues only have their jobs because they produce a product that people are willing to pay money for? Rutten writes as if there’s a constitutional provision that credentialed journalists have lifetime professional tenure no matter how much money his paper loses or makes.”

This attitude is just part of the harm done by the press’s “Fourth Estate” self-image. Actual parts of the government don’t have to turn a profit. People who merely regard themselves as being part of the government apparatus, however, still do.

FRANK WARNER ON THE SURGE: “One little-publicized finding of the new Pew poll is that, compared to last month, Americans now are slightly more optimistic about the Iraq war. The portion of Americans who believe the war is going ‘very well’ or ‘fairly well’ for the United States increased from the all-time low of 30 percent in February to 40 percent this month. . . . In the last month, the percent of Americans saying the war is going ‘not too well’ or ‘not well at all’ dropped from 67 to 56.”

That isn’t huge, but it’s significant. And this reversal as the surge gets underway suggests that much of the decline in support over the past year comes from people who’ve felt we weren’t prosecuting the war vigorously enough, as opposed to people who were simply against the whole enterprise.

UPDATE: Various readers argue that a ten-percent shift in one month is huge. Well, maybe. It would certainly be portrayed as huge if it had gone the other way. . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: More on the “it’s huge” theme.

“MCCAIN-FEINGOLD: FIVE YEARS OF FAILURE.” Pretty much. And it’s looking to be an expensive failure for John McCain. And, I guess, Russ Feingold, who otherwise might be running for President.

AUSTRALIAN TALIBAN DAVID HICKS pleads guilty.

DEATH THREATS AGAINST BLOGGERS? Robert Scoble weighs in. So does Roger van Oech.

REPRESSION IN EGYPT: Sandmonkey reports: I was going to excerpt him, but it defies excerpting. Read the whole thing. And ask, as I’ve asked in the past, why the U.S. is sending the Mubarak regime so much aid.

DAVID CORN AND RICHARD MINITER DISCUSS POLITICS AND THE ELECTIONS over martinis and oysters, in this new video from Pajamas Media.

It’s a lot better than Hannity & Colmes!