WHENEVER I POST LINKS TO THE DANGEROUS BOOK FOR BOYS, people want stuff on girls. How about this: The Smart Girl’s Guide to Sticky Situations. And there’s always the Smart Girl’s Guide to Middle School, which the Insta-Daughter found worthwhile.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: The issue of pork is getting some editorial attention:

A second example of why earmarks won’t die is found in recent articles in the New York Times and the Naples Daily News concerning the odd tale of an Alaska congressman in the land of the palm trees. Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, chaired the House Transportation Committee until Democrats took charge in January. His chairmanship made him a major dispenser of earmarks. He became infamous a couple of years ago by earmarking more than $200 million for a bridge to an Alaskan island with 80 residents.

In 2005, Mr. Young went to Florida for a fundraiser organized by a local developer. It apparently raised $40,000 for Mr. Young’s reelection campaign, according to The Times. A $10 million earmark later materialized on an appropriations bill last year to help connect a Florida road to Interstate 75. The friendly local real estate developer just happened to own land along the road, and its value will rise with the road connection.

Thanks, Don! The check is in the mail! Er, actually, it’s already cleared, hasn’t it. . .? Then there’s this one:

Hard as it may be to imagine, House Democrats took a corrupting, goodie-giveaway practice that served as a prime source of scandal for Republicans and made the process exponentially worse. . . .

Overwhelmed by more than 30,000 requests from his 434 colleagues, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, David R. Obey, effectively has thrown up his hands and refused to even consider them until after House versions of the 13 separate spending bills are approved. At that point, he and his staff alone will sort the worthy from the unworthy, the election-year booty from the lobbyist payoff.

Of course, people are offering to help Obey in his task! But wait, there’s more!

When they took office in January, Democrats made a great show of adopting rules to rein in Congress’ rampant pork barrel practices, requiring that projects earmarked for federal dollars — and their sponsors — are well-publicized. The idea was that subjecting the projects to public scrutiny would weed out the worst abuses — such as the infamous $223 million “bridge to nowhere” in Alaska. But Democrats in the House seem to be blowing their first opportunity to demonstrate they mean business.

Read the whole thing. Is it any wonder that Congress is polling so badly, and that most people think it’s still business as usual despite the promises of cleanup?

BILL FRIST RESPONDS TO QUESTIONS about his One Vote ’08 antihunger campaign, discussed in yesterday’s podcast.

THE GREENHOUSE-FRIENDLY USA! British Petroleum (BP) has a new report out on energy production and consumption worldwide. Going through the tabs I see that U.S. consumption of oil dropped 1.3% from 2005 to 2006. Gas dropped 1.7%. Coal dropped 1.2%. Meanwhile nuclear was up .7% and hydroelectric was up 6.7%.

CAPTAIN KIRK’S Sniglet Blog.

JEFF SESSIONS: Bush should “back off” on the immigration bill. Looks like a lost cause to me, too: The public isn’t behind it, and they don’t have enough credibility to reassure the critics.

FRED TIES RUDY on Rasmussen.

NUCLEAR TAKES A BACKSEAT to coal and oil in China.

JOHN TIERNEY looks at Mother Nature’s pesticides.

DAVID OBEY IS THE NEW TED STEVENS:

Sen. Ted Stevens was the butt of blogosphere jokes and target of blog swarm after blog swarm for the better part of two years when Republicans controlled Congress. But with Democrats in control, House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., appears to be working hard to replace Stevens as Blogosphere Enemy No. 1.

Obey caused an uproar among liberal bloggers in March when he referred to the “idiot liberals” opposed to an emergency spending bill for military operations in Afghanistan in Iraq. Now he is under fire from bloggers on the right for moving to undermine Democrats’ pledge to be more transparent about “earmarking” projects in lawmakers’ districts for federal spending.

Actually, plenty of folks on the left are unhappy with him, too.

IN THE MAIL: Joshua Coleman’s When Parents Hurt: Compassionate Strategies When You and Your Grown Child Don’t Get Along.

JAMES MADISON on intellectual property. He didn’t think it was really “property” at all.

This is something that Rob Merges and I wrote about in the Harvard Journal on Legislation.

REALITY CHECK: Popular Mechanics looks at Compact Fluorescent Lights and mercury. InstaPundit readers won’t find the conclusions surprising.

MEN TAKING CARE OF KIDS: Bad for moms?

WHO NEEDS A GENERATOR, when you can get a big honking battery that will run a refrigerator for under three hundred bucks.

This is actually sort of cool, and much safer than a generator, as there’s no gasoline storage, danger of carbon monoxide (which is nontrivial with generators), etc. My house is actually wired for a generator, with a transfer box and inlet, but I’ve never gotten around to buying one, partly for those reasons and partly because our power has been quite reliable in recent years. (What I should really get is the conversion that turns your hybrid car into a whole-house generator . . . .) Anyway, this is kind of neat. Not really a full-bore substitute for a generator, at least not without adding additional batteries, but not bad, and if you live in an apartment or somewhere that won’t permit a generator it’s a decent alternative.

I already have our cable modem and wireless router on a big UPS that’s enough to run them for days. We may not have lights but we’ll have Internet!

ESCAPE FROM WARSAW: Another kids’ story from World War Two — and, like Snow Treasure, based on a true story.

THIS IS AN OUTRAGE:

Brian D. Kelly didn’t think he was doing anything illegal when he used his videocamera to record a Carlisle police officer during a traffic stop. Making movies is one of his hobbies, he said, and the stop was just another interesting event to film.

Now he’s worried about going to prison or being burdened with a criminal record.

Kelly, 18, of Carlisle, was arrested on a felony wiretapping charge, with a penalty of up to 7 years in state prison.

His camera and film were seized by police during the May 24 stop, he said, and he spent 26 hours in Cumberland County Prison until his mother posted her house as security for his $2,500 bail.

Kelly is charged under a state law that bars the intentional interception or recording of anyone’s oral conversation without their consent.

These guys obviously have something to hide, and I’d like to know what it is. I’ve said this before, but I’d like to see federal legislation guaranteeing the right to tape law enforcement activities in public places. With big damages and attorney fees. (Via BoingBoing).

UPDATE: Much more from Brendan Loy. And I certainly agree with this: “a DA who’d file charges in a case like this is reprehensible.” I don’t know the name of the deputy DA who’s supposed to have approved this, but I’d like to.

MORE ON DDT AND MALARIA: Sam Zaramba writes from Uganda: “Give us DDT!”

We asked Bill Frist about this subject in our podcast yesterday, too.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Rep. David Obey says that there’s not time to look at the 36,000 earmark requests in the House.

Porkbusters is offering to help!

I read with interest news reports that you may only include earmarks in last-minute, un-amendable conference reports, as opposed to amendable House appropriations bills, because you and your staff reportedly need “extra time to evaluate the 36,000-plus earmark requests members have submitted to the Appropriations Committee this year.”

You have also been quoted you as saying: “I think we have a helluva lot more ability [to root out bad earmarks] than the individual working alone.”

Chairman Obey, I share your concern about unworthy projects receiving federal funding due to a lack of careful and thoughtful evaluation, and I agree that one individual working alone would have a very hard time completing this task in a timely manner.

Therefore, I would like to personally volunteer my time to help you and your staff in evaluating this year’s earmark requests.

As you know, Internet technology has made research faster and easier than at any previous time in human history. By releasing your 36,000 earmark requests publicly, I and other taxpayers across the country could work together in a cooperative effort to determine which Members of Congress may have financial conflicts attached to their earmark requests, which local projects may be unworthy of federal funding and which may have value to the taxpayers.

Thank you for your consideration of this matter. I and millions of my fellow taxpayers across America stand ready to help you evaluate these 36,000 earmarks requests. After all, we are the ones who are paying for these requested projects — the least we can do is help you evaluate their merit.

Follow the link if you’d like to sign up!

UPDATE: Related item here:

It’s taken roughly six months for the Democratic congressional majority elected last November to dissipate the public support that put it in power. The latest Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg survey finds just 27 percent of those polled approve of the way Congress is doing its work.

More significant is the 63 percent of those surveyed who said Congress is now conducting its work in a “business as usual” fashion, according to the Times.

Read the whole thing.

NON CIVIL-WAR UPDATE: “Militants from the armed wing of Hamas have threatened attacks on security positions in Gaza belonging to Palestinian rivals Fatah, reports say. Hamas-run mosques in Gaza City gave Fatah fighters two hours to leave their positions.”

CAIR MEMBERSHIP PLUMMETS: “Membership in the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has declined more than 90 percent since the 2001 terrorist attacks, Audrey Hudson will report in Tuesday’s editions of The Washington Times.” Only 1700 members and most of the money from a few individual donors.

UPDATE: More here: “That doesn’t seem to be an awful lot of Muslims for a group that claims to be the principal organization for Muslims on this continent. CAIR doesn’t represent anybody but its funders – such as Saudi Prince Alwaleed, who last year gave them $50 million ‘to create a better understanding of Islam and Muslims’ in America. One way to do that would be to have a better understanding of CAIR. Craven media outlets who roll over for them are caving in to a Potemkin lobby group.”

If CAIR agitated for gun rights, or against abortion, its membership and funding would get a lot more scrutiny.

CNN’S AUDIENCE: Approaching that of InstaPundit? We’re on converging paths. . . .

I SAID BEFORE THAT THIS WAR WAS OVERLAWYERED, BUT NOT WELL LAWYERED. More evidence here:

There may be an unlimited supply of explosives in Iraq, but there is not an unlimited supply of people who know how to wire the detonators. In 2004, CIA operatives in Iraq believed that they had identified the signatures of 11 bomb makers. They proposed a diabolical — but potentially effective — sabotage program that would have flooded Iraq with booby-trapped detonators designed to explode in the bomb makers’ hands. But the CIA general counsel’s office said no. The lawyers claimed that the agency lacked authority for such an operation, one source recalled.

This is war-fighting as HR-office handbook. You can’t win that way.

POLITICAL THEATER ON EARMARKS, FROM DAVID OBEY:

House Appropriations Chairman David R. Obey, D-Wis., today outlined how earmarks will be disclosed before conference, and warned that if Republicans “demagogue” the issue there might be no earmarks in the fiscal 2008 bills.

Bring it on! Threaten some more!

UPDATE: Jules Crittenden surveys the scene and comments:

I think we can now officially call this a lame-duck Congress.

Ouch.

SO GOOD IT IS ALMOST NOT AMERICAN!