TOM MAGUIRE: “That would be ‘Mr. Idiot’ to you!”

Related post here. “Hey, if Jim Henley can do it, so can I!” Everybody makes mistakes. Also here.

SPEAKING WITH PORKED TONGUE: GOP lawmakers who decry pork take their slices.

RAND SIMBERG ON THE C.I.A.: End it, don’t mend it.

APPEARANCE STANDARDS FOR male political candidates.

THIS RECIPE FOR hangover cure pasta sounds like a rough-and-ready (but still yummy) version of this recipe, which is a favorite around our house, though hangovers are vanishingly rare here.

DAVE HOFFMAN interviews George R.R. Martin.

ED MORRISSEY: “Harry Reid doesn’t know when to give up, or more precisely, when to give up on giving up.” He has not yet begun to surrender!

LUNAR LAND PRICES ARE BOOMING!

UBS strategists said their “esoteric research” of archived news reports suggests lunar property trends may even be a leading indicator of U.S. house prices.

Rising sharply between 1997 and 2001, the cost of a slice of land on the moon suffered a mid-cycle retreat in 2002-03 after the dot.com bubble burst, the bank said.

But prices defied gravity to hit record highs of $37 per acre in December 2005 — nine months before U.S. housing peaked.

Their fall to earth was a step ahead too, with lunar prices dropping 56 percent to $16 per acre between 2005 and January 2007, the report said.

“Our calculations suggest lunar land prices appear to be a reasonable lead indicator of U.S. house prices by around 12 months. This suggests a trough in U.S. house prices may occur around the beginning of 2008,” the bank said.

Sadly, the Moon has not yet suffered from an overbuilding problem. (Via Rand Simberg).

UPDATE: Reader Jeff Schultz emails: “Let’s hope this means the President and Congress will bail out those who bought lunar land at inflated prices. The lunar economy is depending on it!” Heh.

FAUSTA WERTZ on Princeton’s phony hate crime. Plus, Tom Maguire looks at the temporally confused Dave Niewert.

MICKEY KAUS: “Provisions buried in the huge omnibus spending bill about to pass Congress gut the program to build a border fence, according to Republicans–and they appear to have a point.”

WHY DID NEW LINE CUT A DEAL WITH PETER JACKSON TO PRODUCE THE HOBBIT? “I would suppose one very relevant proximate cause would be Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne trying to save their asses in the wake of the very expensive The Golden Compass cratering very badly at the box office ($40 million in two weeks, with a nearly 66% dropoff in the second weekend — not good news when your production budget is $180 million and you’ve sold off the foreign rights). My guess: it’ll work.”

A LOOK AT universal health care in Romania.

GIFT IDEAS from grilling diva Elizabeth Karmel.

A BALI GREENHOUSE UPDATE:

AMID talk of offsetting the hefty carbon footprint of the United Nations climate conference in Bali, organisers missed a large elephant in the room.

The air-conditioning system installed to keep more than 10,000 delegates cool used highly damaging refrigerant gases – as lethal to the atmosphere as 48,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, and nearly the equivalent of the emissions of all aircraft used to fly delegates to Indonesia.

With hawk-eyed representatives of more than 100 green organisations present, it was probably the worst place in the world to commit an environmental faux pas.

Well, possibly.

BOOZE AS A TREATMENT FOR COLDS: “Nonetheless, two large studies have found that although moderate drinking will not cure colds, it can help keep them at bay. One, by researchers at Carnegie Mellon in 1993, looked at 391 adults and found that resistance to colds increased with moderate drinking, except in smokers.” Plus, this: “The study, in The American Journal of Epidemiology, found no relationship between the incidence of colds and consumption of beer, spirits, Vitamin C or zinc. But drinking 8 to 14 glasses of wine per week, particularly red wine, was linked to as much as a 60 percent reduction in the risk of developing a cold. The scientists suspected this had something to do with the antioxidant properties of wine.”

Red wine is good for everything.

BILL ROGGIO: Iraq by the numbers.

FRED THOMPSON: The Pejman endorsement.

JOEL ROSENBERG has been on top of that Minneapolis wrong-house no-knock raid. And yes, he’s the same guy who writes fantasy/science fiction novels, but he’s also a handgun instructor.

MORE ON CANADA’S HUMAN RIGHTS PROBLEM: “It’s odd: Mohamed Elmasry, an apologist for Islamo-fascism, using the same tools as an ‘anti-racist’ leftist like Richard Warman. At first glance, they may seem like opposites, but they’re actually identical: Both are illiberal censors who have found a quirk in our legal system, and are using it to undermine our Western traditions of freedom.”

Canadians should start bombarding the Human Rights Commission with complaints about politically correct groups. It’s probably still too soon to go for tar and feathers.

PETER JACKSON will be making a movie out of The Hobbit. Cool.

A THOMPSON / EDWARDS surge in Iowa?

UPDATE: Steve Forbes on Rudy Giuliani and the economy.

GALLUP: CONGRESSIONAL APPROVAL SINKS TO NEW LOW.

A DEBATE VIDEO REMIX from Mary Katharine Ham.

MARK BAUERLEIN on the adversarial campus.

IN THE MAIL: Arthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter’s new novel, Firstborn. It’s funny — I was just cleaning out my office yesterday and ran across a letter from Clarke from a few years ago and wondered how he was doing. Pretty well, it seems.