SUBPRIME SIX UPDATE (CONT’D): Here’s another piece on Chris Dodd and Countrywide from the Hartford Courant.

HEH: “It is weird how so many who claim to like Obama hope he is lying.” It’s all about the difference between glamour and charisma.

CANADA AND TERRORISM: We’re so polite that we can’t see a danger hiding in plain sight:

You know what is the really sobering thing about that ongoing terror trial in Brampton?

Clue: It’s not that there was a plot to attack Canadian targets. And of course there was; the court has heard evidence up the ying-yang that there was just such an enterprise afoot. Was it the finest plot ever? Oh hardly. Were its members variously bumblers, what those who hang around courts call “yutes” or raving hotheads? Absolutely. But there was a plot.

It’s not even the hate, chiefly for Jews and Americans, that one of the group leaders preached at the drop of a hat and the top of his lungs with almost magnificently ungrammatical, near-illiterate, Koran-ignorant hysteria.

It’s that he felt so free to preach it.

It’s that he felt comfortable enough to hand out jihadist CDs outside at least one Toronto mosque and to occasionally turn up in combat fatigues at another. It’s that he giddily talked to one of his alleged co-conspirators about the obligation to kill Jews whenever one finds them. It’s that the leadership of the group regularly met at a half-dozen mosques in the GTA, usually on Fridays, the day of communal prayer. It’s that within minutes of meeting Mubin Shaikh, a fellow Muslim-turned-CSIS informant-turned-paid-RCMP agent, he was openly verbally indulging his bloodlust and “recruiting” Mr. Shaikh: Their shared religion was enough.

But Canada’s “human rights” kangaroo courts will make sure to silence the Mark Steyns who point out that this sort of thing is going on. So that’s something.

FRED THOMPSON on Obama and Boumediene.

Plus, Stephen Bainbridge debates Richard Epstein.

UPDATE: J.D. Johannes has thoughts, too: “The global war on terror is over. Welcome back to the criminal investigation of terror. I think we all remember how effective that was.”

MARC DANZIGER GOES SOLAR, with Elon Musk’s Solar City. I called them a while back and they said they were California-only for at least the coming year, though they did have plans to expand out my way. Haven’t heard any more, but I’d certainly consider them. Nice that I’ve got Marc as a guinea pig.

SPEAKING OF BEING IN THE TANK FOR OBAMA, Howard Kurtz looks at the campaign finance flipflop and observes:

And all these liberal commentators who have always supported campaign finance reform, getting big money out of politics, many of them are defending Obama. And I have to think the press is cutting him a break here.

Gee, do you think?

SOME VERY COOL spacewalk pictures.

SUBPRIME SIX UPDATE: More on Chris Dodd in the Hartford Courant.

UPDATE: Reader John Marcoux emails: “The Fox News Watch panel were pretty much in agreement that if the Countrywide offenders were Republicans, the MSM would be all over the story. As it is, best coverage is local like your Hartford Courant link.”

I agree.

INFRASTRUCTURE: “What happens when you don’t build more power plants? Get ready for spiking electricity rates, brownouts and even blackouts as demand soars.”

That’s what happens when NIMBYism, etc., block new investment. The graph showing declining excess capacity in electrical generation is very worrisome. I guarantee, however, that those who have been blocking new power plants won’t take responsibility for the problems they’ve created. Instead, they’ll blame evil corporations.

JUST IN TIME FOR THE BEACH! The MANGROOMER Do-It-Yourself Electric Back Hair Shaver. I guess once you start, though, you’re committed. The stubble must be something fierce . . . .

AMERICAN JUDAISM FACES A SHORTAGE OF MEN: “Contemporary liberal American Judaism, although supposedly egalitarian, is visibly and substantially feminized.”

GEORGE WILL: “Listening to political talk requires a third ear that hears what is not said. Today’s near silence about crime probably is evidence of social improvement.”

Or maybe people just don’t want to talk about the Section 8 problem.

NO CONTEST: Ann Althouse vs. Clark Hoyt. “Have the balls to say she was right.” I think you have to have those removed before taking that job.

BUT THEY SIGNED KYOTO! Air Travel and Carbon on Increase in Europe.

Meanwhile, U.S. greenhouse emissions are down. It’s a topsy-turvy world!

A BUNCH OF new DVD releases.

MASS MEDIA POWER OVERRATED? Say what you will about the underlying issue, there’s been no topic — even Iraq — on which media coverage has been more one-sided and unrelenting than that of man-made global warming. And it’s been worse in Britain than here. And yet . . . Poll: most Britons doubt cause of climate change. “The majority of the British public is still not convinced that climate change is caused by humans – and many others believe scientists are exaggerating the problem, according to an exclusive poll for The Observer. The results have shocked campaigners who hoped that doubts would have been silenced by a report last year by more than 2,500 scientists for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).”

Shockingly, almost two thirds think it’s just a scheme to raise taxes.

FIGHTING ANTI-APPALACHIAN PREJUDICE.

GLENN GREENWALD IS UNHAPPY WITH OBAMA’S FISA FLIP-FLOP, and even less happy with the way the leftosphere has given Obama a pass:

In the past 24 hours, specifically beginning with the moment Barack Obama announced that he now supports the Cheney/Rockefeller/Hoyer House bill, there have magically arisen — in places where one would never have expected to find them — all sorts of claims about why this FISA “compromise” isn’t really so bad after all. People who spent the week railing against Steny Hoyer as an evil, craven enabler of the Bush administration — or who spent the last several months identically railing against Jay Rockefeller — suddenly changed their minds completely when Barack Obama announced that he would do the same thing as they did. What had been a vicious assault on our Constitution, and corrupt complicity to conceal Bush lawbreaking, magically and instantaneously transformed into a perfectly understandable position, even a shrewd and commendable decision, that we should not only accept, but be grateful for as undertaken by Obama for our Own Good.

Accompanying those claims are a whole array of factually false statements about the bill, deployed in service of defending Obama’s indefensible — and deeply unprincipled — support for this “compromise.”

Everything’s for your own good: It’s the magic of the Messiah. Get with the program, Glenn! Meanwhile, Matt Yglesias is spotted hoping that an Obama Administration will engage in “massive abuses so the right can get what they’ve been asking for.”

Arthur Silber, meanwhile, says that no one is safe.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, a reverse flipflop from Obama on immunity. And, actually, I should give Greenwald credit for not being in the tank on this as so many are.

MORE: Reader Phil Dean emails: “Thanks for linking to Greenwald’s critique of Obama’s FISA
support and the left’s reaction to it. What I think this shows is that all the Bush-is-shredding-the-Constitution rhetoric was, at its core, fundamentally unserious. Greenwald seems surprised by this.” Yes, he does, and yes, it was.

SAN FRANCISCO’S Middle-Class Exodus: “The number of low- and middle-income residents in San Francisco is shrinking as the wealthy population swells, a trend most experts attribute to the city’s exorbitant housing costs. . . . ‘A kind of derogatory term for the city would be Disneyland for yuppies,’ said Hans Johnson, demographer with the Public Policy Institute of California.” (Via NewsAlert).

UPDATE: Reader Rahul Banta emails:

Nice link to the SF housing article. As a resident of the city, I can tell you that what our Board of Supervisors (our city council) has done in their “well intentioned” laws have basically created what they say they don’t want, a very rich San Francisco and a very poor San Francisco. A house with a small yard for an average two child family is over a million dollars. If you are poor, you can put your name in for a lottery for a subsidized house/condo which is paid for by taxes on the wealthy and/or on the developers who build the houses.

There are huge amounts of red tape for builders to put up any amount of new housing and guess what, if you try to add more supply of housing, you get hit with rules on a certain amount being “below market rate.” Translation, less profit and less incentive to build more housing. Then there is rent control. I won’t even start with that.

As we have found in any situation of global “shortage” it is often politically driven and laws reduce supply, not the market.

Indeed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Greg Barto comments:

I think that if you want to live in SF and can afford to, that’s fine. And if you can’t afford to live in SF, well, that’s how life goes. What I find interesting, though, is that the leftist rich of San Francisco simultaneously price the guy who makes their Starbucks out of the housing market and laud $4.50/gallon gas as a great way to keep people from driving so much. And then they claim to be for the little guy.

Indeed. Plus this: “While SF screws its middle class, they assuage their rich liberal guilt by making it a mecca for the homeless.”

FROM MICROSOFT RESEARCH, the World Wide Telescope. Description here.

ANOTHER VICTORY FOR TYRANNY: “Mugabe’s opponent chooses the better part of valor, and steps aside. He is quoted to the effect that the U.N. is supposed to protect him and guarantee fair elections. But somehow the U.N. didn’t. So why are we paying the U.N. anyway?”

MICKEY KAUS: “Is Obama’s new faux-presidential, alternative-reality seal his ‘Mission Accomplished’? If you wanted to emphasize to voters that the Democrats’ nominee is a bit stuck up, it would be hard to do better. I suppose he could start requiring reporters to stand when he enters the room.”

IN THE MAIL: Robert Scheer’s The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America. So far the reader reviews appear to be uniformly positive; I guess the choir likes the preaching!

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: “The answer the policy people prescribe is more police. That is the ticket. Subsidies for the gangs on one hand. More police to fight them on the other.”