HERE’S A VIDEO about ongoing research and development in military nanotechnology. (Via Nanodot, where Chris Peterson has further thoughts.)

MORE sectarian violence.

A LOOK AT journalists and their choice of words.

YOU MEAN IT’S ALL SOME KIND OF POLITICAL SHELL GAME? “The politicians are making loud noises about repealing AMT, but they can’t afford to. If the Bush tax cuts are to be kept in place, the AMT will provide $1.3 trillion of tax revenue in the next 10 years. So don’t believe any politicians who promise to repeal AMT; they’ll get it back from you somewhere else. They have to.” They don’t like to actually cut taxes; they prefer to move them from constituency groups to non-constituency groups.

A MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY ESSAY, from Jeff Goldstein.

Meanwhile, it occurs to me that King has been turned into a wooden saint — a la George Washington — rather than the complex, flawed, and heroic human being that he actually was. It also seems to me that today’s students — this is certainly true of my law students, both black and white — no longer really grasp the reality of the pre-Civil Rights era. That’s a good thing overall, of course. But in teaching about this stuff, I’ve favored excerpts from the excellent, though lengthy Eyes on the Prize documentary, and I’ve also used the excellent (and rather accurate for such things) Brown v. Board of Education docudrama, Separate But Equal, in which Sidney Poitier plays Thurgood Marshall. (Charles Black is played by an actor who, as Black said to me once, bears an unfortunately close resemblance, something that can’t be said for Poitier and Marshall. . . . I think that Black was a bit jealous of that.) It’s a docudrama, so they take some liberties, but they’re comparatively minor — the plot is based on Richard Kluger’s Simple Justice — and the legal discussion is actually rather good. But more importantly the film makes clear that Brown was far from preordained, that there was a lot of disagreement in the black community and the civil rights community about how to proceed.

I think it’s good that the pre-Civil Rights era has receded in our collective memory, but I also think it’s important that we retain some sense of just how different things were then.

UPDATE: Video of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More on King here.

HAVE A LITTLE FAITH: Gaius writes:

I just got off the phone with my son. One of the wonders of the modern world is that I can actually talk with my boy even though he is so far away serving his country. It wasn’t like this not so many years ago. Then, when the troops went off to war, it was communication by mail as a rule. Bruce Kesler once told me in an email that he did get to call home once from Vietnam, I guess that’s the first war where that occurred. But nowadays it is pretty common. Both phone and email are available pretty much whenever the troops are at a base.

One of the hardest things for me this past year has been watching the erosion of support for the men and women serving in this war. I remember watching almost the same scenes play out during the Vietnam war. Support flagging at home leading to morale problems, leading to more erosion at home, and on and on in a spiral. The media not helping then or now. And I know it troubles my son and his fellow soldiers. Because they are keeping the faith for those back home.

It is we here at home who are not reciprocating. Or at least far too many are not.

Or too many are here are growing weary of a war they are not even really fighting. Very few bloggers and very few of the people in the media actually have family members engaged in this war. Still fewer politicians. And the politicians feel free to play politics with the entire war as a means to count partisan political coup upon one another.

But the men and women serving in this war, voluntarily, continue to keep the faith. They continue to do what is asked of them. The carry out their mission. Even in the face of flagging public support, even when politicians are busy trying to use them as political weapons, they carry on. They have faith in us.

Is it too much to ask that we also have faith in them?

I don’t know where this sudden ooze of defeatism comes from, but it seems clear that the troops don’t share it.

UPDATE: Take a look at this cartoon, too.

EMPIRICAL RESEARCH ON GUNS AND VIOLENCE:

During the past decade we’ve added a minimum of 30 million new firearms in public hands – at least 10 million of which were handguns. Since 1993 we’ve gone from 21 states with “shall-issue” or unrestricted concealed-carry legislation to 39. We’ve had an influx of “assault weapons” and “pocket rockets” – supposed engines of death and destruction far more lethal than the weapons available in the 60’s.

Yet homicides declined. Non-fatal firearm related crime declined.

Lots more at the link.

JONAH GOLDBERG DEFENDS NPR: “It’s got flaws, but I think it’s actually very well done and close readers will note I listen to it a lot.”

It’s the best-done radio in America, and a model for my own podcast production efforts, though I think they’d benefit from a bit more diversity.

GAY PATRIOT: “It… Is… Bush’s… Fault!”

MICKEY KAUS on the surge:

I wonder how much of the blame for the “too late” part will turn out to fall on Karl Rove. It seems highly likely that Bush knew many months ago that a new Iraq plan was needed, but delayed for fear of disrupting his overconfident Republican strategist’s flat-footed midterm election strategy–even though, it seems clear now, declaring this new initiative seven months ago might have saved the Republicans in the election.

It was certainly clear — pointed out here in the past, and, much more vociferously, by Bill Quick — that Bush’s loss of support on the war was largely due to pro-war people who felt he wasn’t serious about fighting the war. So Kaus may be right.

UPDATE: Bruce Rolston is unimpressed.

DON SURBER: “John Bolton is the real-life Jack Bauer.” Nonsense. Bauer would never wear that mustache, except as part of an ingenious disguise.

AUSTRALIA’S ANTI-TERRORISM STANCE:

Despite their differences on Iraq, the major parties have been more or less united on the need for a tough-minded approach to national security. Mr Beazley generally supported Mr Howard’s anti-terrorism legislation and his position has been followed by Kevin Rudd, who took over as Opposition leader last December. . . .

Put briefly, the Australian system takes Islamist ideology seriously. It does not deal with radical Islamists. It confronts extremists’ views, rather than seeking to co-opt “pragmatic” radicals who happen not to be in favour of the use of violence in the here and now for purely tactical reasons. After the bombings of 7/7 in London, Tony Blair declared correctly that “the rules of the game had changed”. In Australia the rules changed dramatically some time earlier. A few recent examples illustrate the point.

After the shock of 7/7 Mr Howard established a Muslim Community Reference Group and said that no radicals would be invited to join. When Sheikh Taj Aldin al-Hilali (the Mufti of Australia) ventured into Holocaust denial, Andrew Robb (the Parliamentary Secretary for Multiculturalism) let it be known that he would not be reappointed to the group. Last February Peter Costello (Mr Howard’s deputy) publicly declared that, if the radical Muslim cleric Abdul Nasser Ben Brika really wanted to live under Sharia law, he might choose voluntary deportation to Iran. The next month the Prime Minister told Reuters TV that Australia could not ignore “that there is a small section of the Islamic population which identifies with some of the more extremist views associated with support of terrorism”. In New South Wales the former Labor Premier, Bob Carr, and his successor, Morris Iemma, have made similar candid statements where necessary.

Sounds like they’re way ahead of us. Bush Administration, take note. (Via See-Dubya).

RON CASS: “We all have a pretty good idea what the money was doing in Representative William Jefferson’s freezer. But the questions about President William Jefferson Clinton’s National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, just keep piling up. It’s time we got some answers. . . . It is a story the news media should be desperate to explore, not desperate to avoid.” You’d think.

IN THE MAIL: Andrew Roberts’ A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900. The title is an obvious riff on Churchill, but on first glance it seems to have a lot in common with Jim Bennett’s thinking, too.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: More on Harry Reid, the new Trent Lott:

A beaming Harry Reid last week basked in the adoration of the Democratic Party’s leading Senate reformers and its nine freshman senators. They extravagantly praised the new majority leader as the exemplar of ethical reform. But within 48 hours, Reid was opposing full transparency of earmarks. This week, Republican reformers will target Reid with an amendment to the Senate ethics package.

Sponsored by Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, the proposal is called the “Reid amendment” because he inadvertently inspired it. Coburn would tighten loose anti-earmark restrictions in the ethics bill by prohibiting senators from requesting earmarks that financially benefit a senator, an immediate family member of a senator or a family member of a senator’s staffer.

The proposal follows the revelation that Reid’s four sons and his daughter’s husband all have been lawyers or lobbyists for special interests. While Reid has declared they are barred from lobbying for their clients in his office, there is little doubt they have taken advantage of their close proximity to a powerful senator.

An example is provided by earmarks that have sent millions of federal dollars to the University of Nevada at Reno. Reid’s son-in-law, lawyer Steven Barringer, was a paid lobbyist for the university. In general, Republican reformers see Reid illustrating the nexus between legislators and special interests, in his case mainly real estate, gambling and mining.

Reid is far from the only prominent member of Congress who would be violating Coburn’s amendment if it passed.

Pay close attention to developments here. Note that Reid’s efforts to derail reform were backed by Lott. I suspect that Reid will prove a similar kind of liability to the Democrats — like Lott, he’s a pretty good behind-the-scenes guy who must now serve as a public face, and who isn’t well-situated for that role.

MITT, BE NIMBLE: Thoughts on Romney’s candidacy, from Jeff Jacoby.

Meanwhile, two other potential 2008 Presidential candidates, Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich, published this piece on Baghdad in the Wall Street Journal. Giuliani continues to hedge on the question of whether he plans to run.

MICKEY KAUS on the surge:

I wonder how much of the blame for the “too late” part will turn out to fall on Karl Rove. It seems highly likely that Bush knew many months ago that a new Iraq plan was needed, but delayed for fear of disrupting his overconfident Republican strategist’s flat-footed midterm election strategy–even though, it seems clear now, declaring this new initiative seven months ago might have saved the Republicans in the election.

It was certainly clear — pointed out here, and, much more vociferously, by Bill Quick — that Bush’s loss of support on the war was largely due to pro-war people who felt he wasn’t serious about fighting the war. So Kaus may be right.

THINK OF IT AS EVOLUTION IN ACTION:

If consumer eugenics becomes cheap and ubiquitous, as I suspect it will, won’t religious people want their offsprings’ genes tweaked to make them religious, too? With the result, if those differential birthrates hold up, that the world will become more religious generation by generation?

And if these things come to pass, won’t churches and religious groups, from sheer self-interest, be lobbying for more choice in baby-design via genetic tweaking? While the legions of the godless clamor for restrictions on these techniques in fear of an advancing theocracy?

Just a thought. I am enjoying a quiet smile, anyway, at the prospect of an octogenarian Ramesh railing angrily on National Review Inbrain (“beamed direct to your cerebral cortex!”) against those who seek to restrict parental choice in determining the religiosity of their offspring…

Heh.

EDWARD LUTTWAK: “President Bush has managed to divide and conquer the Middle East.” Hmm. Not sure what I think of this analysis, though it has a lot in common with Spengler’s take, mentioned below.

ROGER SIMON writes on Al Gore’s impending Oscar.

EMBEDDED BLOGGER BILL ARDOLINO OFFERS an interview in the Jacksonian tradition.

Bush is sounding pretty Jacksonian too.

TOM W. BELL WRITES: “Per your musings about the policy effects of TurboTax, please see the piece I wrote at Cato.org.”