BILL HOBBS INTERVIEWS SEN. LAMAR ALEXANDER on immigration and Iraq, and Alexander’s planned amendment to the immigration bill.

ANOTHER EMAIL FROM MICHAEL YON:

After the arrest of General Hamid in Hit last week, there was serious concern there would be violence. Hamid was/is a hero to many Iraqis. In fact, our own soldiers talked about Hamid with admiration. When our soldiers arrested Hamid and 14 police that day, our guys were upset. They had run many missions with those police, and did not want to arrest them. LTC Doug Crissman was saddened that he had to arrest General Hamid. But Hamid was running wild, and many of the Iraqis could see it. I arrived back in Baghdad yesterday. Up to that point, there had been no violence in Hit subsequent the arrest. There was a peaceful demonstration, and someone threatened to kidnap Hit City Council members to secure Hamid’s release, but nothing had happened. Anbar Province in general seems to have turned a corner for the better. There is still some fighting, but the action has greatly abated this year.

Not so down in Basra and Maysan, where our British friends are fighting.

I’m with Strykers again, which means I will be in combat again soon. Strykers go where the trouble is.

I look forward to another report.

CLASH OF TITANS: The FBI vs. the Zabar’s Zeitgeist.

J.D. JOHANNES POSTS ANOTHER DISPATCH FROM IRAQ:

The times I have been around injured Marines I pitched in to help. I ran to get the stretcher. The only photos I have taken of an injured person were of a Soldier treating an Iraqi man for shrapnel wounds. You see the soldier doing his job, but not the face of the Iraqi man.

If I were to be wounded while embeded with Soldiers, Seabees or Marines they would provide medical attention and likely risk their lives to protect me and save my life.

I feel I should reciprocate because these young men and a few women I roll with outside the wire would not stand around snapping photos of me while I bled out–they would do what they do best. Save Lives. . . . Perhaps I do not have what it takes to be a big-time big-media reporter.

I agree with him on journalistic detachment. Wasn’t it CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta who got criticized by the usual journalistic chin-pullers for treating some wounded Iraqis instead of maintaining his reportorial distance?

J.D.’s work, like Michael Yon’s, is supported by reader donations. If you like it, consider hitting the tipjar.

NEWS FROM AFGHANISTAN: “So far this year, Taliban and drug gang related violence has left about 1,700 dead. It’s less than last year, and lower than the average annual death toll in Afghanistan for the last three decades.”

FOCUSING ON THE BOOBIES: It pretty much always works!

IT’S ALL IMMIGRATION, ALL THE TIME AT KAUSFILES: Mickey remains on fire, but what about the cars? And the Burkle-bashing?

CLAIRE BERLINSKI WRITES on what’s going on with Europe.

UPDATE: Our podcast interview with Claire from a year ago can be found here. And there was some followup discussion here.

HONEYMOON OVER:

Six weeks ago the Democrats held a 24-point lead over Bush as the stronger leadership force in Washington; today that’s collapsed to a dead heat. The Democrats’ overall job approval rating likewise has dropped . . . Yet the Democrats’ losses have not produced much in the way of gains for Bush or his party.

Our political class is dysfunctional, and the polls indicate that the voters realize it. (Via Dean Esmay, who notes Obey’s pork moves).

STUART BUCK SAYS I WAS WRONG IN THIS POST, where I criticized the USDA over mad-cow testing. He makes a convincing case. He also warns about “the danger of trusting anything that a journalist says about a legal proceeding.”

REMEMBERING THE SIX-DAY WAR forty years later.

NIGERIA UPDATE:

The kidnapping of foreign oil workers has increased in the last month, despite police and military efforts to stop it. Nearly 150 have been taken so far this year, yielding at least $100,000 per captive in ransom. No one ever says anything, on the record, about ransoms. However, the money is simply too good, and has attracted some well run criminal organizations. . . . While the oil companies are trying to treat the ransoms, “danger pay” and additional security, as a cost-of-doing-business in Nigeria, it is reaching a point where is simply is not worth the extra effort. Nigeria is in danger of seeing its primary source of income (mainly for corrupt politicians), shut down by the cost of dealing with criminal activity.

Sigh.

FORMER HIPPIES UPSET ABOUT SMELLY STREET PEOPLE driving down their property values — in Haight-Ashbury.

MY EARLIER POST on Cape Wind reminded me of something I had read a while ago, and this column on the Cape Wind affair brought it back: “A tip of the hat to author William Tucker, who wrote an essay for Harper’s magazine in December 1977 titled, Environmentalism and the Leisure Class: Protecting birds, fishes, and above all, social privilege.” That article, on how rich landowners who wanted to protect their views used bogus environmental claims as a smokescreen, fits the Cape Wind scenario pretty well, too.

UPDATE: Speaking of which, this federal legislation looks pretty suspicious. Notice that it’s sponsored by a representative of a coal state. And though the bill purports to protect birds from wind turbines, note these figures on bird deaths from the article sidebar:

Human-caused bird deaths

Domestic cats: Hundreds of millions a year

* Striking high-tension lines: 130 million – 1 billion a year
* Striking buildings: 97 million to 976 million a year
* Cars: 80 million a year
* Toxic chemicals: 72 million
* Striking communications towers: 4 to 50 million a year
* Wind turbines: 20,000 to 37,000

Source: National Research Council

Ban cats!

MORE: Read this, too. And this.

I’M WATCHING DAVE KOPEL ON BILL O’REILLY, and O’Reilly has been reduced to yelling “shut up!” at Kopel.

Watching O’Reilly try to paint Kopel as a big lefty “secular progressive” just demonstrated that O’Reilly has no idea what he’s talking about. I’m not a big O’Reilly fan — the one time I was on his show he would hardly let me get a word in edgewise, and he’s obviously frustrated that he couldn’t do that with Kopel. O’Reilly was just wrong about this story and he’s not willing to back down and admit it, substituting bluster for actual evidence. Not very impressive, but O’Reilly made the mistake of booking a guest he couldn’t bully on an issue where O’Reilly was just wrong.

Background here.

UPDATE: More from Clayton Cramer.

WILLIAM JEFFERSON UPDATE:

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) moved quickly to force the expulsion of Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.) from Congress following his indictment Monday on federal corruption charges.

The Republican leader will ask members of the House to vote on a resolution requiring the ethics committee to review the indictment filed against him in order to seek his expulsion from the House, according to his office.

Boehner will offer a privileged resolution on the House floor as early as Tuesday calling for the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct to review the 94-page indictment filed against Jefferson Monday. The House will then vote on his resolution calling for the ethics panel to act.

The Justice Department indicted the Louisiana Democrat Monday on federal charges of racketeering, soliciting bribes and money laundering.

Boehner’s resolution is intended to “jump-start” a previous investigation into Jefferson’s alleged misdeeds that apparently expired last year.

I think we’ll see a lot of this sort of thing in the next year or two.

THOUGHTS ON FREE SPEECH AND THE LACK THEREOF, from John Leo.

LOADS OF COOL NEW MARS IMAGES HAVE BEEN RELEASED, and you can see them here.

THIS ISN’T VERY ENCOURAGING: “Overall, 4.0% of search results link to risky Web sites, which marks an improvement from 5.0% in May 2006. Dangerous sites are found in search results of all 5 of the top US search engines (representing 93% of all search engine use).”

On the other hand, maybe it’ll make things dangerous for those Google-using terrorists . . . .

KAYAKING on the Tennessee River, at downtown Knoxville.

MORE BACKGROUND on the JFK terror plot.

“REAL IF TEPID SUPPORT” for Bush’s climate change plan.

Well, you wouldn’t want heated support . . . .

AN ECONOMIC VIEW of the Democratic debate.

NEW LEGISLATION ON GUANTANAMO seems to have created more confusion than it dispelled:

Omar Ahmed Khadr, a Canadian national, faced murder charges for killing an American soldier in Afghanistan with a hand grenade when he was 15-years-old. In a surprise ruling, the presiding judge at the war crimes tribunal Monday, said he does not have jurisdiction to try Khadr under a new 2006 law.

The judge said according to the new law, each detainee must have been officially designated as an “unlawful enemy combatant.” He said Khadr had only been designated an “enemy combatant.” The judge did say, however, Khadr could be recharged if he undergoes a new hearing to determine his status.

A Defense Department spokesman told VOA the military prosecutor will appeal the ruling to a board in Washington set up to supervise the tribunals.

Osama bin Laden’s former driver also is due to appear later Monday before the war crimes tribunal in Guantanamo.

This war has been over-lawyered, which is not to say that it has been well-lawyered.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: An interesting nanotechnology development at Harvard:

George M. Whitesides, a Harvard University chemist, is a renowned specialist in nanotechnology, a field built on the behavior of materials as small as one molecule thick. But there is nothing tiny about the patent portfolio that Harvard has amassed over the last 25 years based on work in his lab.

Today, Harvard and Nano-Terra Inc., a company co-founded by Professor Whitesides, plan to announce the exclusive licensing for more than 50 current and pending Harvard patents to Nano-Terra. The deal could transform the little-known Nano-Terra into one of nanotechnology’s most closely watched start-ups.

Big news.