PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE: THE FOURTH GREAT ASSAULT on the Anglosphere.

THE SOCIAL WEB SHOULD HAVE ITS LIMITS, and this should be beyond them.

UGH: “RIAA Pushes Through Internet Radio Royalty Rates Designed To Kill Webcasts.”

KERRY VS. RICE: Jules Crittenden comments. “That appears to be intended to show how ill-prepared the Bush administration is. But it pretty much sums up the anti-war camp’s contribution, while demonstrating the practical political constraints faced by a wartime presidency that is fighting on multiple fronts … one of the most critical being in Washington.”

THOSE “CHRISTIANISTS” ARE EVERYWHERE: “Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards says Jesus would be appalled at how the United States has ignored the plight of the suffering, and that he believes children should have private time to pray at school. . . . Edwards has often cited religion as a part of his politics, frequently linking his efforts to fight poverty as a matter of morality.”

Can’t we keep religion and politics separate?

UPDATE: Reader Robin Lyons emails: “I doubt Edwards was thinking of the plight of the suffering when he was moving in to the $20 million mansion…….”

Motes, beams, and all that.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Chuck Simmins emails: “Glenn, his new home means that he, at least, will not be suffering. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Plus, still more religion in politics:

So I just want to talk a little about Moses and Aaron and Joshua, because we are in the presence today of a lot of Moseses. . . . They took them across the sea that folks thought could not be parted. They wandered through a desert but always knowing that God was with them and that, if they maintained that trust in God, that they would be all right.

Though, technically, I guess this isn’t “Christianism.”

JIM BENNETT POSTS A REVIEW of John O’Sullivan’s new book. “O’Sullivan has written the right book at exactly the right time in history. “

PROBLEMS WITH BIOFUELS.

And background here.

OIL SANDS AND OIL SHALE: Tapping North America’s frontier hydrocarbons.

FORECASTING space weather.

A RATHER TOUGH ANTI-HILLARY AD from Obama supporters.

UPDATE: Questions about the ad’s provenance.

MICHAEL YON POSTS A REPORT FROM IRAQ. Excerpt:

There’s a lot of talk back at home that morale among American forces is low here. While writing this, I called Rich Oppel from the New York Times, who is in Baghdad, to ask him how morale looked from his vantage. Rich said that a lot of the soldiers are not happy with the extensions of their tours, something I have heard soldiers complain about also. However, I watch morale very closely. More closely than all else. Low morale in a particular unit can be the result of poor leadership in that unit, or just not getting mail, for instance. But gauging morale is not a simple affair of asking a few soldiers. A person has to live with them across Iraq. Having done so, my opinion is that overall troop morale is good to high. (If their morale could be bottled, it would probably would sell like crack, then be outlawed.)

During this latest loop around, we visited American and Iraqi soldiers, and people in very different kinds of locations. Most of the things I saw, heard and smelled will never find their way into any particular dispatch. But they will be added to the near mountain of background facts that shape the context that allows me to speak with a little authority. Just a little. If morale starts to sag, I will be one of the very first to know. I’ll know it even before most of the troops know it. And if I see morale sagging, I’ll write about it.

Read the whole thing.

COULTERISM on the left. There’s plenty of it to go around.

DAVID BERNSTEIN:

If private companies had mismanaged outpatient care for veterans the way the V.A. system has, there would be strong calls from all the usual quarters for a government takeover, and proclamations of how we can’t trust “greedy” for-profit companies to take care of veterans. Funny how this thought process doesn’t seem to work in reverse, except among “free market ideologues,” who have been criticizing the V.A. for years.

Plus, a look at the claim that people who don’t believe in government do a bad job running it, with the unfortunate but not surprising conclusion that people who do believe in government also do a bad job running it . . .

UPDATE: More political contradictions on health care.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ouch.

RICH HAILEY: “What Does Giuliani’s Popularity Say About Conservatives?”

Excerpt: “To me, it’s a pretty simple answer really. Conservatism has never been dominated by the religious right the way liberals have always pictured them to be. Fiscally conservative socially liberal conservatives are a dime a dozen. It just doesn’t make for good campaign fodder for either side to recognize their existence.”

THE LIBBY TRIAL MAY HAVE BEEN ECLIPSED by other events, but Tom Maguire continues to follow it: “The jury does not have transcripts of any of the witness testimony they heard last month. Consequently, they are relying on their own memories plus any notes they took to recreate critical testimony. It it quite possible that on at least a few topics, the eleven jurors have offered an even dozen versions of that testimony – ironists among them may be wondering how they can convict Libby for forgetting what they themselves can not remember. With the passage of time, this may be helpful for the defense.”

UPDATE: More here.

IT’S HARD OUT THERE FOR A PARENT: The Insta-Wife looks at the latest development in treating parents like children.

UPDATE: Here’s a sort-of-related post from Cory Doctorow. And read this, too. And this.

A BAD REVIEW for L.E.D. lighting.

THIS SEEMS USEFUL: A weather radio that automatically warns you of tornado warnings, etc. One of the reviews says that it saved the reviewer’s family. For disaster preparedness, the government should encourage everyone to have these, and use them for other kinds of warnings, too. Kind of like the old NEAR system that never took off.

IT’S NOT ONLY A FAKE SOUTHERN ACCENT, it’s a bad fake southern accent. You’d think that someone who spent years in Arkansas could do better.

UPDATE: Thoughts on southern accents, real and fake.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More phony political accents.

MORE: Greg Sargent says it’s unfair to point out Hillary’s bad southern accent because “Hillary was actually quoting the hymn lyrics of someone else — while clearly and very openly imitating (not very well, it turns out) the cadences she thought the lyrics would traditionally have been delivered in. There was nothing phony about it at all.”

I’m not sure about that. Imagine, say, Mitt Romney trying to sound like a southern black woman while reading a poem in Selma. I don’t think he’d come across any better, and I suspect that he’d be widely mocked for it. Really, fake accents are like funny hats — things that all prudent and experienced politicans should avoid.

NORM COLEMAN on port security.

AN OPEN LETTER TO CPAC on Ann Coulter.

ALEX BEAM: “Can a Mormon be elected president in 2008? No.”

He raises that whole polygamy thing again. But given the phenomenal success of The Girls Next Door (check out the online video), I wonder if that dog will hunt.

HILLARY VS. OBAMA, in Selma.

Meanwhile, on another front, Mickey Kaus comments:

The idea of requiring a union, without a secret ballot election, if labor organizers can obtain a majority of “cards” from employees seems like both a big idea and a bad idea. (See below.) If Republicans were smart and confident, wouldn’t they make a big deal of this–drag the debate in Congress out to give it more prominence, highlighting Obama’s support for this change which (more than any tax cut) would alter the very texture of the economy? Voters–even many socially liberal peacenik voters–traditionally worry that if Dems gain full power they will a) serve their special interests and b) cripple American capitalism in a fit of leftish nostalgia. This bill legitimately triggers both fears. … I don’t think this is an endorsement Obama had to make for political reasons. As Dick Morris says, he’s sitting pretty–he can be anything he wants to be. He could be a lot more Gary Hartish! He must want to be an old-fashioned unionizer.

Read the whole thing, as he’s got much more.

WI-FI BUSES?

BOB KRUMM IS CONFUSED: “Where are the hate-mongering christo-fascist theocrats?”