JOHN HINDERAKER ON OBAMA AND HOLDER:

Holder is a legitimate target because of the Rich affair, I guess, but frankly I have little or no interest in who helps Obama choose a V-P. What bothers me most about these battles is the implicit assumption by some that just about any involvement in the business world is somehow suspect. . . . This is frankly stupid. Covington & Burling and O’Melveny & Myers are top-notch law firms that have represented a vast array of clients. The idea that there is something wrong with associations with companies like UBS, Exxon Mobil and Hewlitt Packard is absurd. If any connection with a top law firm or a large corporation is somehow taken as a black mark, pretty soon those who advise our Presidential candidates, or serve in their administrations, will be as inexperienced as, say, Barack Obama himself. That would be a sad outcome.

Good point.

BOB BECKEL embarrasses himself.

THERE’S A BEAR IN THE WOODS SUBURBS: “Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency officers were tracking a black bear Sunday afternoon in a West Knoxville neighborhood. Officers got a call at 3 p.m. from a resident off Amherst Road who spotted the animal munching on the bird feeder in his back yard.”

MORE PHOTO QUESTIONS: What photographers do I like, and who do I emulate? I like a lot, most of whom — like Ansel Adams — I have better sense than to try emulating. I guess William Eggleston — some photos here — was something of an influence. And Walker Evans, with whom I share a strong interest in signs. But they’ve influenced a lot of people, mostly to better effect than me, I suspect. But I kind of see things the way they do, anyway.

Evans’ best work, in my opinion, was with James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Not something I’d care to try to emulate, though, and certainly not something I’d succeed in emulating if I tried, any more than I’d succeed in emulating Agee’s prose skills. As a great philosopher once said, a man’s gotta know his limitations.

BARACK OBAMA, deviating from “politically correct feminism.” “Now, I know what he is trying to do is to push more men to be involved in their children’s lives, but the way he is saying it, he is siding with traditionalists who think the male role is special, distinctive, and necessary.”

UPDATE: It’s nice to see Obama discussing “the duties of fatherhood,” but I hope he’ll follow up with more on the ways in which society undervalues fatherhood, and what to do about that, and not just stress punitive, nanny-state approaches regarding child-support.

HOMELAND SECURITY IS A JOKE (CONT’D:)

Lee Cooper of Solomons had done the smart thing and signed up for e-alerts about flight delays. So, thanks to a United Airlines e-mail, he knew that his 7:25 p.m. flight from Knoxville to Dulles was delayed until 9:40 because of air traffic control backups. That should have saved him more than two hours of waiting around at the airport. He did two more smart things: He printed his boarding pass and went to http://www.tsa.gov to check the average wait times at security checkpoints between 8 and 9 p.m.

His diligence, however, was unraveled by the Transportation Security Administration, which closed the security checkpoints at 7:30 p.m.

The result? Cooper ended up on the wrong side of security and had to wait until the next day to depart.

Jeez.

THOUGHTS ON Tim Russert and Father’s Day.

ENVIRONMENTAL GOOD NEWS: Leatherback turtles return to Texas. “For the first time since the 1930’s, federal biologists confirmed that a leatherback sea turtle has nested on a Texas beach, at the Padre Island National Seashore near Corpus Christi. . . . The giant, ancient, endangered turtles, some the size of a Smart Car, have until now only been known to nest in four spots in the United States – with about three dozen females a year laying eggs on beaches along the east coast of Florida and slightly larger nesting populations in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.”

THE CARNIVAL OF SPACE is up!

A GUIDE TO SUMMER ENERGY SAVINGS.

SHUTTING DOWN ULYSSES: “After more than 17 years of pioneering solar science, a joint NASA and European Space Agency mission to study the sun will end on or about July 1. The Ulysses spacecraft has endured for almost four times its expected lifespan.”

Pretty good value for the money, I’d say.

JAMES LILEKS: “I feel as if Bizarro World is slowly leaking into ours. . . . It’s not that we cannot produce any more oil; you suspect that some are motivated by the belief, perverse as it sounds, that we should not.”

DAVID BERNSTEIN: “There is a prevalent myth that large law firms, especially old, ‘white shoe’ firms, are bastions of patrician conservatism. This may have been true forty years ago.”

“IF THE AP MOCKS YOU, cap ’em with a nine.” Heh.

WIKIPEDIA SCOOPED A.P. on the Tim Russert story.

LOTS OF NICE PHOTOS FROM PITTSBURGH at Pittsburgh Skyline.

AN AUDI A4 TDI THAT GETS 46 miles per gallon. Now available . . . in Britain.

AT THIS RATE, THEY’LL SOON MISS JOHN HOWARD: Australia to define three glasses of wine as “binge drinking.” (Via Andrew Bolt, who is not amused; nor should he be as that’s square within the “healthy” range). Scroll to the end, though, and there’s a hint that this is motivated by a desire for more tax revenue.

A SKINNY LAPTOP PC THAT competes with the Macbook Air?

IN THE MAIL: S.M. Stirling’s The Scourge of God: A Novel of the Change.

WHEN WELFARE STATES GO WILD. Alas, yelling show us your budgets! doesn’t produce much in the way of exciting video.

YES, I GET IT: You don’t like my country.

IF YOU WANT TO HELP OUT PEOPLE IN IOWA, this list of charities should still work.

THE ECONOMIST: “Many things in Iraq have at long last started to go right.”