DARRELL ISSA warns Waxman.

A TEACHER OF AN OLD-FASHIONED SORT:

A TEACHER who swore, smoked and showed his students knife-fighting techniques has been allowed to remain in the classroom.

A disciplinary panel heard Joel Edmund Roache told year 9 students on a school camp that the best way to knife someone was to “stab them in the kidneys because then the person inhales and can’t exhale or scream”.

It’s hard to find a school with a good knife-fighting curriculum these days. The Insta-Wife and I have had to teach the insta-daughter at home. Not even Sylvan would help.

OVER AT DAILYKOS, a poll on Hillary’s baby-bond proposal. It’s not doing as well as I’d expect.

IN THE MAIL: Charles Stross’s new science fiction novel, Halting State.

Plus, Walter Bagehot’s Physics and Politics, with an introduction and notes by Roger Kimball.

IS DAILYKOS’S TRAFFIC EXAGGERATED?

UPDATE: Remembering past traffic wars. This reminds me that people used to accuse Sitemeter of undercounting, not overcounting. Hey, it’s not perfect, but it’s free. Still, I think this caveat is still true: “measuring web traffic accurately is basically impossible.” Not that measures of TV, radio, or newspaper audiences are any better.

Meanwhile, Dan Riehl looks at some Alexa numbers. I don’t believe in those much, as they depend on people being dumb enough to install the Alexa toolbar. . . .

Note how Slashdot is doing on Alexa.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Frank J. emails:

I noticed all the blogs have had a huge dip in Alexa rankings over the past year without necessarily having a dip in traffic according to Site Meter. My guess is it’s just more people are using Alexa as a standard and thus more people are learning how to game it. It’s pretty sensitive, as I’ve had a significant rise in rank on Alexa over the past couple weeks just by putting the toolbar on my own browser.

Alexa is worthless. No doubt if I encouraged InstaPundit readers to install the toolbar I’d go up, which would make Alexa happy, and otherwise mean . . . not much.

And I notice people in the comments asking questions about my traffic — er, folks, I’ve had an open counter for years. It’s in the right sidebar, or you can click here.

A LOOK AT ATF from the inside.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Is there a connection between earmarks and corruption?

This Roll Call story might make you wonder:

Since hiring Richard Kaelin, Visclosky’s former chief of staff, at the beginning of 2004, PMA and its clients have roughly doubled their fundraising support for the Congressman. That help includes contributing 50 percent of the total funds raised through June 30, 2007, by Calumet PAC, Visclosky’s four-year-old leadership political action committee, according to an analysis of federal election records.

It is a classic Washington, D.C., triangle of interlocking self-interests: in this case, a powerful Congressman, an influential lobby shop and the lobby firm’s numerous clients. And while it is impossible to know the exact reasons that some firms get earmarks and others do not, in Visclosky’s case, there are certain irrefutable facts: PMA and its clients are the Congressman’s top fundraisers — and PMA clients his top earmarking recipients.

Coincidence? I’m sure they’d argue that there’s nothing shady going on here. But why should we believe them? More coincidence here:

Clients of the PMA Group have fared particularly well by Visclosky this year. They won 14 of 28 earmarks he inserted into the Defense spending bill alone — a total of $28 million in projects, or some 52 percent of the funds Visclosky earmarked in the bill, according to an analysis by Roll Call and Taxpayers for Common Sense. (A Roll Call analysis of Visclosky’s earmarks last month undercounted his support for PMA clients, since the firm failed to file a mid-year report with the Senate detailing its work for ProLogic, a West Virginia-based company and a tenant in the technology center.)

The Indiana lawmaker’s help steering millions of federal dollars to PMA clients this year comes against the backdrop of what appears to be the firm’s most aggressive fundraising for him to date. In the first six months of this year, PMA and its clients contributed $248,400 to Visclosky’s leadership PAC and personal campaign coffers, 29 percent of his total haul.

It’s as if there’s a culture of corruption, or something.

UPDATE: People are accusing me of playing Name That Party! Well, I try not to make a big deal of party affiliation in these Porkbusters posts, because pork is — quite clearly — a bipartisan problem. But lest I be accused of hiding the ball, well, here you go.

BILL ARDOLINO REPORTS ON the evolution of the Fallujah police department.

WESLEY CLARK’S daunting free speech standard.

RUDY GIULIANI’S cell phone problem.

THE CLODFATHER. Sounds like one of those Mad Magazine parodies. Which, come to think of it, is about right.

UPDATE: Paranoid?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Helen Thomas, Mafia don?

THOUGHTS ON Burma, gun control, and David Hume.

TRASHING THE HARVARD LAW REVIEW: In dead-tree form, that is.

GREENHOUSE UPDATE: “Not only is China importing US vehicles. Not only are they importing gas-guzzling US Hummers. Now they’re importing US Hummers stretched to breaking point.”

“A PANDORA’S BOX of antiwar ugly.”

QUESTIONS ABOUT American culture and violence.

BILL ROGGIO looks at the Taliban campaign to overthrow Musharraf.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. A rather positive assessment of Al-Sadr. I’d certainly like him to be right.

BOYCOTT POLITICS IN BRITISH ACADEMIA: “Bound by laws that they passed, they now howl in frustration since they find their own freedoms circumscribed. These laws were designed to silence their enemies, not themselves.”

MORE ON DOINGS at Ave Maria Law School.

GETTING A LITTLE TOO CHUMMY on The View. “Yes, Whoopi implicitly acknowledged, she’d like to do Mr. Pelosi – but she might take his wife while she’s at it. ‘I would do her as well. But we should wait on that because you’re still in office, I don’t want to cause a problem.'”

GARY BECKER on the decline of unions in America. Richard Posner comments.

ARE ELITE UNIVERSITIES hoarding resources at the expense of their students?

Should there be a 5 per cent payout requirement? “What this means is this: rich schools have chosen to charge students high tuition and then use the funds to increase the size of their endowments (especially so at Harvard, Yale, and, I believe, Princeton) rather than relieve financial pain for parents. The IRS requires non-university charities to spend 5 percent out of their endowments if they want to keep tax exempt status. There is a reason for that.”

A LOOK AT BARACK OBAMA’S non-nuclear world. “Obama’s proposal would require existing nuclear powers to dismantle all the visible signs of their weaponry. It would not require Iran or North Korea to do without shipping containers. Obama’s proposal might reduce the odds of an all-out nuclear exchange but at the cost of making a limited nuclear surprise attack or terrorist WMD strike more likely — and without riposte by the victim nation. Would this be a safer world than today’s?”

EARMARKS, INC.