HOWARD KURTZ: Could some Republicans support Hillary?

MR. BRODER GOES TO WASHINGTON:

One starts to get the feeling here that some of the divides in the rift between Mr. Broder and the Democratic caucus are not so much political but cultural. The chairman of the Washington Post Company, Donald Graham, served in Vietnam, and Mr. Broder himself is an army veteran. The notion of a Washington politician declaring a war lost even as American GIs are appearing in arms on the field of battle in the cause of freedom abroad, well it has a way of grating on those who have worn the uniform, a fact that many of Mr. Broder’s readers, if not the 50 senators, understand.

Via reader C.J. Burch, who comments: “I didn’t think congress could get worse under the Democrats. I was wrong. I’m suspecting a number of people are noticing that.”

UPDATE: Reader Timothy Daley points out that James Webb, who signed the letter, “wore the uniform.” Good point. I think the difference is cultural, really. And, as I suggested before, the point it to tell Democratic columnists that they are not to leave the reservation.

FORGET 9/11 TRUTHERS — all the cool paranoids are getting behind the 4/29 Truth movement.

Everybody knows that fire doesn’t melt steel. And the government coverup has already begun!

CANADA: A hotbed of piracy. Arrrh!

KANSAS MALL SHOOTER: Another case of someone with mental problems who should have been institutionalized, but wasn’t. No surprise, really. And, also typically, the shootings took place in a “gun free” area.

HAMAS OFFICIAL: Kill all Americans. Remind me again why we’re giving these people money. Aren’t they, you know, our enemies?

“WHY EVEN THE FRENCH WILL LIBERALIZE:” A hopeful take.

LAWRENCE KAPLAN: Congressional leaders are illiterate on Iraq. Excerpt:

There are two possibilities: First, Reid and Pelosi could be purposefully minimizing the stakes in Iraq. Or, second, they don’t know what they’re talking about. My guess is some combination of the two. Political maneuvering certainly contributes to the everyday pollution of Iraq discourse. But a lot of the pollution derives from legislators being functionally illiterate about the war over which Congress now intends to preside. In this, of course, they’re hardly alone. The Bush administration’s wretched Iraq literacy has been well-chronicled. But, with Congress demanding a louder say in the management of the war, the same knowledge gap that plagued our arrival in Iraq looks like it will be revived just in time for our departure.

Whatever explains the literacy gap, this much at least is obvious: Having been called into being by politicians on both sides of the aisle, the war in Iraq no longer bears a relation to anything they say. You don’t need to cherry-pick quotes to prove the point: Nearly every time a senator’s mouth opens, something wrong comes out. . . . Most of all, illiteracy makes for good politics. There is the conviction, to paraphrase McCain, that winning a war takes precedence over winning an election. But it isn’t so clear that this conviction guides a partisan brawl in which the Senate majority leader can gush, “We’re going to pick up Senate seats as a result of this war.” In such an environment, the subordination of facts to politics inform matters small and large, from the relatively trivial question of whether U.S. troops still operate in Tal Afar to enormous questions regarding the future of the U.S. enterprise in Iraq.

Via Ace, who has more excerpts.

UPDATE: Don’t miss this video, either.

ANOTHER GRUNT’S rant on Iraq.

OWEN WEST: Why Congress should embrace the surge.

HOW THE NANNY STATE KILLS CHILDREN. Think of it as a nanny who doesn’t much care what happens to the kids, so long as there’s no blame. . . .

THOUGHTS ON happy people and happy cultures. “Admittedly, the optimal level of cheer (or optimism) in a society is impossible to assess in the abstract.”

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION UPDATE:

Anyone who knows much about real power in Congress knows that almost every member of the House and Senate lusts after a seat on the Appropriations Committee and hopes one day to achieve the status of Cardinal. The Cardinals, of course, are the folks who chair the various Appropriations Committee subcommittees and literally control the billions of dollars that pass through their hands.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) chairs the Senate Rules Committee, but she’s also a Cardinal. She is currently chairwoman of the Interior, Environment and Related Agencies subcommittee, but until last year was for six years the top Democrat on the Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies (or “Milcon”) sub-committee, where she may have directed more than $1 billion to companies controlled by her husband.

If the inferences finally coming out about what she did while on Milcon prove true, she may be on the way to morphing from a respected senior Democrat into another poster child for congressional corruption.

The problems stem from her subcommittee activities from 2001 to late 2005, when she quit. During that period the public record suggests she knowingly took part in decisions that eventually put millions of dollars into her husband’s pocket — the classic conflict of interest that exploited her position and power to channel money to her husband’s companies. . . .

Melanie Sloan, the executive director of Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington, or CREW, usually focuses on the ethical lapses of Republicans and conservatives, but even she is appalled at the way Sen. Feinstein has abused her position. Sloan told a California reporter earlier this month that while”there are a number of members of Congress with conflicts of interest … because of the amount of money involved, Feinstein’s conflict of interest is an order of magnitude greater than those conflicts.”

And the director of the Project on Government Oversight who examined the evidence of wrongdoing assembled by California writer Peter Byrne told him that “the paper trail showing Senator Feinstein’s conflict of interest is irrefutable.”

Yet as the article notes, the story isn’t getting much press, and she’s now chairing the Rules Committee. Follow the link for more from The Hill.

UPDATE: An emailer who requests anonymity says there’s less to this story than meets the eye, but I can’t find any online refutation. (It doesn’t help that technorati isn’t working at the moment.) Anyway, bear that in mind and I’ll see what I can find out later.

ANOTHER UPDATE: See this post at the Sunlight Foundation website.

LAWYERS ARE EASILY AMUSED: “We’re partying like rock stars down here at Law Blog headquarters in Lower Manhattan. Why? Because today is Law Day!” Don’t spill the champagne.

Of course, some people are partying because of those $50,000 clerkship bonuses! Jeez. I only got $10K, and I thought it was a lot. I bought my first laptop, a Toshiba T1100+, for $2589 — a bargain — from 47th St. Photo.

FRED THOMPSON IS LOOKING AT AN UNCONVENTIONAL CAMPAIGN if he runs:

Thompson, his wife and advisers in Washington and Tennessee also are drawing up plans for a new style of campaign that would rely heavily on technology and his celebrity status to avoid some of the slogging through the snow in Iowa and New Hampshire that is normally required of White House hopefuls.

The advisers say Thompson, who plays District Attorney Arthur Branch on NBC’s “Law & Order,” is researching ways to use technology — including the Web, videoconferences and teleconferences — to harness the enthusiasm for his candidacy among grass-roots bloggers and activists. The campaign also would rely on large events, such as those that have in part supplanted country-store campaigning for some in the Democratic field.

“Well-known candidates can do things a little differently,” explained one adviser. “You show up, you’re accessible, but you don’t have to go to every county seat several times.

Originally, the idea of a late-start campaign for Thompson looked like something of a lark, but the phantom candidacy is accelerating.

As I’ve said before, I think that the combination of the Internet and the Feiler Faster Principle means that Thompson can get in late and still do well. We’ll see if I’m right, but obviously he’s looking into the subject. (Via ElephantBiz). With people already getting tired of the front-runners in both parties, this just might be a smart strategy.

UPDATE: Fred-skeptic A.C. Kleinheider isn’t buying it: “It appears as though Fred Thompson is drinking from the same Kool-aid pitcher a lot of folks have since the internet was invented by Al Gore.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: A New Hampshire reader emails: “If Thompson avoids ‘slogging through the snow in New Hampshire and Iowa,’ he will make a terrible mistake.”

Well, it’s not as if the Blog Primary is the real primary. Which is too bad for Thompson at this point!

RUPERT MURDOCH thinks that the Wall Street Journal has a winning strategy.

I wonder what inspired him to take this step? Er, probably just his native business acumen, actually.

HOW MANY PEOPLE HAVE THE “PUBLIC HEALTH EXPERTS” KILLED? Possibly quite a few, by encouraging people to stay out of the sun: “Those studying the vitamin say the hide-from-sunlight advice has amounted to the health equivalent of a foolish poker trade. Anyone practising sun avoidance has traded the benefit of a reduced risk of skin cancer—which is easy to detect and treat and seldom fatal—for an increased risk of the scary, high-body-count cancers, such as breast, prostate and colon, that appear linked to vitamin D shortages.”

Upside: Most people didn’t listen! Downside: If they were tobacco companies we could sue them.

THE BEES STRIKE BACK! “A swarm of bees clustered outside the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Medical Center shut down the emergency room Monday, as officials waited for a beekeeper to come vacuum up the 7,000 insects.”

Or maybe they were trying to get help!

IT’S THE ANNIVERSARY OF BUSH’S “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” SPEECH, which has lots of lefties chortling.

Er, except that Harry Reid seems to agree, really, with the “end of major combat operations” that Bush was celebrating:

“The military mission has long since been accomplished. The failure has been political. It has been policy. It has been presidential,” Reid said in excerpts of the speech released by his office.

At the time of the speech, of course, the complaint from many Democrats was that Bush was generating campaign-commercial footage out of a military triumph that belonged to all Americans, given the wide support for the war. Well, that story has changed, as the many, many Democrats who supported the war try to execute their pivot.

That said, I was one of the relatively few critics of the event back when it took place, and I strongly suspect that the Bush folks wish now that they hadn’t done it. Well, live and learn.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey notes that people should pay more attention to what Bush actually said four years ago. Read the whole thing. And note what Hillary Clinton said!

A MAY DAY PROPOSAL FROM ILYA SOMIN: “We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century’s other great totalitarian tyranny. And May Day is the most fitting day to do so.”

I think some people are already working on that.

BOEHNER BEATS MCDERMOTT in cellphone-tapping lawsuit.

NICK GILLESPIE OBSERVES: “Hmmm, so air quality seems to be getting better, despite overall population and economic growth in these United States? Why doesn’t that sort of thing ever get pushed to the top of such stories?”

Er, because it wouldn’t foster gloom, panic, and demands for more government regulation?

MEGAN MCARDLE HAS THOUGHTS on children and marriage. The gene pool needs you, Megan!

CORAL IS DYING: A look at efforts to bring it back:

Mr. Nedimyer focuses most of his efforts on coral, something he got into almost by accident several years ago, through his work as a wholesale dealer in aquarium supplies, a business he has operated for 35 years. One of his products is “live rock,” reef rubble that bacteria colonize. In aquariums, the bacteria help break down waste from fish.

He had permission from the government to gather live rock at a particular site and one day about 10 years ago, he noticed that a few bits of rubble had something growing on them. “I didn’t know what it was at first,” he said. “I saw five of these little things. I kept watching them and pretty soon they started to grow out into staghorn coral.” He set the rocks aside, underwater, and managed to keep the coral growing in spite of storms and other problems. When he found broken pieces of coral he stuck them in other pieces of rock, and “sometimes they would live.”

Read the whole thing, which is very interesting.

MITT ROMNEY’S FAVORITE NOVEL turns out to be . . . Battlefield Earth? He must be telling the truth. Who would make that up? And why?

I’m still looking for the candidate whose favorite novel is something along these lines.