AL KAMEN ON Nancy Pelosi and gas prices.

Is it really her fault? No more than it’s Bush’s — though she could help matters longterm by pushing a relaxation of rules on offshore drilling. Er, and refineries.

BANNING FAST CARS to fight global warming. Even the Prius wouldn’t pass this rather strict test:

Chris Davies, a British member of the European Parliament, is proposing one of the most-extreme measures — a prohibition on any car that goes faster than 162 kilometers (101 miles) an hour, a speed that everything from the humble Honda Civic on up can exceed. He ridiculed fast cars as “boys’ toys.”

Is it climate-protection, or social engineering? As I’ve said before, the hairshirt approach to environmentalism is a mistake, but some people can’t resist it — because for them, the hairshirt isn’t a bug, but a feature.

J.D. JOHANNES WRITES on how Al Qaeda is winning the information war even as it’s losing the actual war.

But al Qaeda’s largest harvest from “random slaughter” strategy was realized in America. Through acts of indiscriminate violence transmitted by the media, insurgents brought their war to America’s living rooms. The atrocity-of-the-day is the principal informational input most Americans receive. This forms their knowledge base. The public does not live in the villages and mahalas of Iraq. Patterns of recovery, of normalcy, are not evident.

This is the essence of 4th Generation Warfare. And al Qaeda is clearly winning it. . . . Al Qaeda is running its war on smoke and mirrors – or, more accurately, on bytes of sound and sight. Congress could act on General Petraeus’ reports from the ground, rather than broadcasts generated by insurgents. This requires a simple commitment – one foreign to many in the elective branch: Leadership.

Read the whole thing. Targeting our politicians and journalists is clearly going after our weak points. . . .

THE EXAMINER: Hold Firm on Iraq.

THIS WILL MAKE SOME PEOPLE FEEL OLD: “Pink Floyd’s hit — ‘The Wall’ — is as contemporary today as ‘Chattanooga Choo-Choo’ was in 1969.”

MOLLOHAN UPDATE:

Rep. Alan B. Mollohan (D-W.Va.) paid a Washington law firm more than $22,000 during the past three months, according to his most recent campaign finance report.

Last year, the FBI reportedly investigated whether the congressman had properly disclosed his real estate investment with a West Virginia businessman whose company received a $2.1 million contract with the federal government earmarked by Mollohan.

Mollohan paid the Washington law firm Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans & Figel $22,671 in three installments from the middle of May to the end of June, according to Federal Election Commission filings released Tuesday.

Mollohan’s office did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

Mollohan, who chairs a prominent subcommittee on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, was forced to relinquish his position as the ranking Democrat on the House Ethics Committee in 2006 amid revelations surrounding lucrative real estate investments, including one with a former aide-turned-lobbyist, and questions about his connection to a series of nonprofit groups in West Virginia that had received millions in federal funding.

More on Mollohan here. So far, promises of a cleaner Congress remain unfulfilled.

FREEMAN DYSON ON OUR BIOTECH FUTURE:

I predict that the domestication of biotechnology will dominate our lives during the next fifty years at least as much as the domestication of computers has dominated our lives during the previous fifty years.

I see a close analogy between John von Neumann’s blinkered vision of computers as large centralized facilities and the public perception of genetic engineering today as an activity of large pharmaceutical and agribusiness corporations such as Monsanto. The public distrusts Monsanto because Monsanto likes to put genes for poisonous pesticides into food crops, just as we distrusted von Neumann because he liked to use his computer for designing hydrogen bombs secretly at midnight. It is likely that genetic engineering will remain unpopular and controversial so long as it remains a centralized activity in the hands of large corporations.

I see a bright future for the biotechnology industry when it follows the path of the computer industry, the path that von Neumann failed to foresee, becoming small and domesticated rather than big and centralized.

Read the whole thing. (Via The American Scene).

ARMY RECRUITING, which had been running ahead of goals, has now fallen short two months in a row. Interestingly, this coincides with the new wave of surrender-talk in Congress, which probably does cause volunteers to think twice. Still, I worried about this in our podcast interview with (then) Army Secretary Francis Harvey last year. The Army still thinks it’ll make goal for the year as it started out ahead, but this subject deserves close attention.

UPDATE: Hey, numbers are bad all over. And here’s more background on the Army numbers.

IT’S A MADAM-O-RAMA. I still think we should legalize prostitution. More on that here.

FANTASIES AMONG SOME OF IRAQ’S SUNNIS.

COLUMNIST BRUCE BARTLETT calls it quits: ” I think there will always be a market for quality commentary, however, and some day someone will figure out a better way to make money from it. In the meantime, I have decided to devote myself to writing books, where authors still have control over their output and can make better money.”

A LOOK AT blog power in the Congressional Record.

SUPREME COURT JUSTICES: Different, but so similar.

A BASE-PLEASING 2008 Democratic ticket.

SOME THOUGHTS ON touching at work.

CHINA APPLIES MUSCLE in America.

THOUGHTS ON CRACKING IRAN, from Investor’s Business Daily. “It won’t take much to topple the regime. That should be our goal. Taking action today will save us a lot of heartache tomorrow.” I certainly hope that’s true.

UPDATE: Not much optimism here.

APPLAUSE BUT NOT DEVOTION:

House Republican Whip Roy Blunt spoke this afternoon to an audience at the Heritage Foundation in an address entitled ‘Laying the Groundwork for a Revolution.’ Blunt set forth the principles that he believes must guide Republican efforts to regain a majority on the Hill. In the main, Blunt reaffirmed the ideas that won Ronald Reagan the presidency and which earned a GOP majority in Congress starting in 1994. . . .

Blunt said lots of things to remind fiscal conservatives and security hawks why they need Republicans in leadership. But to the extent that bloggers represent the GOP base–admittedly, a somewhat iffy proposition–he probably won’t get a lot of love. And even if he did, would it make a difference in 2008?

Well, it might. But mostly this is news that the GOP leadership is starting to recognize the problem. The key will be what it does over the next year or so, not what its leaders say.

OKAY, THEN HOW ABOUT: MORE BLARNEY, LESS BARNEY. Nope, that doesn’t work, either . . . .

UPDATE: Heh.

GREENLAND’S warm and forested past: “But Dr. Willerslev does offer a consolation prize, of sorts, for climatologists. Ice as old as that which he analyzed is normally useless for climate analysis. But the types of trees he found — including spruce and pine — show that winter temperatures couldn’t have been below about 0 degrees Fahrenheit, and summer temperatures must have been above 50.”

DOES THE D.C. MADAM HAVE A SOFT SPOT FOR THE PRESS?

One of the numbers dialed out from Palfrey’s phone on the afternoon of Jan. 3, 2001 matches that of the Tribune national desk.

You know, if I were running a prostitution ring, I’d be sure that my little black book had the names and numbers of a lot of bigshot journalists, politicians, and law enforcement people even if they weren’t actual customers. Just as insurance. . . .

CONN CARROLL THINKS THAT THE L.A. TIMES’ attacks on Fred Thompson are manna from Heaven: “If Thompson keeps his primary fights confined to Michael Moore and the LAT, he’ll cruise to victory.” That the LAT is backing off its own reporting doesn’t hurt.

WELL, YEAH: “The more I learn about the direction and pace of biotechnological innovation, the more I think bioconservatism is increasingly irrelevant.”

AN AL GORE / JOHN ROBERTS COMPARISON that I didn’t see. But that’s why I’m an ordinary blogger instead of an extraordinary one, like Jeff.

THOUGHTS ON RFK JR. AND TREASON.

UPDATE: TigerHawk sees a parallel.