BRING IT ON:

Scientists at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center are about to embark on a human trial to test whether a new cancer treatment will be as effective at eradicating cancer in humans as it has proven to be in mice.

The treatment will involve transfusing specific white blood cells, called granulocytes, from select donors, into patients with advanced forms of cancer. A similar treatment using white blood cells from cancer-resistant mice has previously been highly successful, curing 100 percent of lab mice afflicted with advanced malignancies.

I certainly hope that this pans out.

IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, a reference to my colleague Alex Long: “a law professor at the University of Tennessee and perhaps the nation’s leading authority on the citation of popular music in judicial opinions.”

KRUGMAN IS STUMPED, but Obama himself provides the answer.

DO WE HAVE A CONSERVATIVE SUPREME COURT? “Sure, conservatives are cheering the Heller decision, but how ‘conservative’ is a Court that invalidates the death penalty for child rape and declares that non-citizen detainees held outside U.S. sovereign territory by the military have a constitutional right to bring habeas actions in federal court, despite federal legislation to the contrary? Viewed as a whole, this term saw a Court that often defied easy ideological characterization.”

OUCH: In ‘survival mode,’ newspapers slashing jobs. “The increasingly rapid and broad decline in the newspaper business in recent months has surprised even the most pessimistic financial analysts, many of whom say it’s too hard to tell how far the slump will go.”

No wonder they’ve been telling us we’re in the midst of a second Great Depression. For them, it’s been true.

UPDATE: Reader Jerry Carroll emails:

Glenn: I’m enjoying your glee over the death of newspapers. But what will replace them when they’re gone? Think anybody is going to leave the comfort of their chair once a week to trudge to the city council and report on a blog what happened so the rest of us know? I see the time coming when there won’t be anyone watching local government, and what we know will only be what it wants us to know.

It’s not “glee.” And, in fact — as I’ve said repeatedly — I think the reason that newspapers are tubing is that they’re replaced the kind of hard-news reporting described above with editorializing and “attitude,” often in support of political positions that many people don’t agree with. I’d much rather see them flourish while doing a good job, but they’ve been cutting budgets for actual reporting for decades. Read Andy Krieg’s Spiked: How Chain Management Corrupted America’s Oldest Newspaper, to see how this trend was already underway twenty years ago. If you turn out a product whose quality is steadily declining, while simultaneously treating a substantial part of your customer base as somewhere between evil and idiotic, don’t be surprised if your business gets worse. I’ve said for years that hard-news reporting is the killer app for Big Media, but they just don’t want to do it. They want to tell people what to think, instead of telling them what’s happening.

MORE: Reader Tom Fojtik emails: “In response to the guy expressing concerns about what replaces newspapers for those who want to know what is going on in city hall. We already have it and it’s called ‘cable access tv.’ I can watch myself at the bi-weekly Plan Commission four times a week if I want. And sometimes it’s even mildly entertaining.”

STILL MORE: On Jerry Carroll’s “glee” comment, a reader emails:

I don’t know how he/she came to such a conclusion about your attitude. I have felt it a bit too much sympathy. Your response is without a doubt, the bottom line. And concerning Jerry’s assessment of readers of the paper, we may be better off without them if that’s the extent of their desire to be informed. What can they tell city council but how the school needs more tax dollars for sex ed and global warming? For many of us its more of a “comfort” getting a cup of coffee, clicking on certain favorites and staying above the imposition of distortion and agenda.

And reader Arthur Barie writes: “One quick google search found a blog that does excellent work covering politics here in my county. Don’t be surprised if most counties have someone who takes this stuff seriously.” And it’s not as if local media do such a bang-up job covering local politics anyway.

MORE STILL: Reader Peter Farmer emails:

I reside in the Chicago area, and have read the local “Chicago Tribune” for most of my life (I am 47). I started reading it as a grade-schooler, and have had ample opportunity to see the changes at the Tribune Co. over the years. The Tribune used to be a great newspaper, one which could be relied upon to report the news as impartially as possible for a human institution. Sure, I can remember my father grumbling about it – he was a senior executive at Motorola and had many dealings with the press – but we certainly never cancelled our subscription or questioned its professionalism.

I cannot mark precisely when the Tribune and The New York Times began to go downhill; I began to notice dramatic changes in the nature and quality of the content about ten years ago. Most conspicuously, nearly every section and article – save perhaps the comics and the sports page – contained more and more opinion and less and less factual content. I’ll be the first to admit opinion writing has its place, but one must first know the facts before forming opinions about them, and newspapers like the Tribune seemed to have progressively less regard for this vital task on a daily basis than ever before. What sealed the deal for me was their “reporting” about the war in Iraq. I have studied the military and military history for over 30 years, and have many sources of information in that field besides newspapers. After the invasion, it was easy to discern that few if any Tribune or other big-city newspaper reporters left the safety of their hotels in the Green Zone. Apparently, it is OK to sit in the bar with your colleagues from the other papers and maybe CNN or CBS or NBC, and simply phone it in without getting yourself dirty. Worse yet, as the Israeli-Palestinian flare-up of two years has shown, our news services are remarkably gullible, and willing to be used by stringers working for our ideological enemies, i.e. Al-Qaeda, the PLA, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc. or foreign news agencies biased against western values, such as Al-Jazeera. The AP was duped or worse, knowing used, “photo-shopped” images that purportedly showed an Israeli air strike against a marked ambulance, but were later exposed by internet fact-checkers as fraudulent propaganda on the part of the PLA. And, as you and many others in the conservative blogosphere have noted, Abu Ghraib made the front pages dozens and dozens of times, but not the good news about the war. Since the surge, presto! Good news about the war is nowhere to be found in the NYT or Tribune. Thank goodness for the blogosphere, and writers like Michael Yon and Ralph Peters.

Another nail in the coffin for the credibility of reporting by the dinosaur media is the sudden proliferation of celebrities as experts on everything from global warming to hostiles in the Iraq or Darfur to gay marriage. When did Rosie O’Donnell become an authority on anything besides mediocre comedy? And now – with a straight face no less – Al Franken is being considered seriously in some liberal-left quarters as Senatorial material. If that isn’t proof we’ve lost our collective minds, I don’t know what is! Perhaps he and Jerry Springer can hammer out the problem with the national debt in between cracking one-liners and interviewing one-legged transvestites or staging fights between estranged lovers.. Way back in the old days, when I was a kid (yeah, I know, the snow was ten feet deep and you had to walk twenty miles to school, grandpa), folks like these would have been laughed out of any serious newsroom or studio; they wouldn’t have made it in the door of any truly professional establishment, not to mention the Congress. Now, the Tribune features a column by Garrison Keillor, he of “Prairie Home Companion” fame. He has a nice show once in a while, but aren’t there better and better-qualified choices for a regular spot on your editorial page?

I am one of those folks who will mourn the death of the big-city news daily when it finally comes. I love a well-written newspaper, and the Fourth Estate has a critical role to play in the health of our Republic, if only they would in fact perform that role. Incidentally, author and physician Michael Crichton predicted the decline of the traditional media over decade ago; a transcript of one of his speeches on the topic is available on his website. Finally, my wife is from a small town, and we get the local newspaper each week – it shows all of the idiosyncrasies, of course, but all of the common sense, too – it respects the intelligence of the readers and does not stoop to political activism or naked partisanship. Maybe I’ll send a copy to the Tribune to show ‘em how it is done. Of course, they are too busy campaigning for Mr. Obama to notice….

Indeed.

DEMOCRATIC ATTACKS ON MCCAIN’S MILITARY RECORD: “When Obama loses in November, these schmucks can look back at such tactics and pinpoint where it all started going downhill. These same people whine like little b—hes at the slightest criticism of Barack Obama. But they go right into the gutter when attacking John McCain.”

UPDATE: With Wesley Clark, “we’re a long way from George Marshall.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Heh:

The Saddest Thing About Barack Obama’s Available Military Expertise…

…is that though he has Wes Clark in his corner, the only person he knows with the experience of getting a bomb on target is Bill Ayers.

Again, heh.

THE TENNESSEE REPUBLICAN PARTY MUST BE DOING SOMETHING RIGHT, if it’s getting attacked in the Huffington Post. But, as usual, the attacks on Republicans soften the fact that it was Tennessee Democrats talking about Obama having possible connections to terrorists.

TODAY IS THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY of the Tunguska event.

THOUGHTS ON NARCISSISM and demographic decline.

IN THE MAIL: Elvin T. Lim’s The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush. The subtitle may make it sound a bit like a Bush-bashing book, but in fact it’s about a decline that has taken place over decades.

MICHAEL TOTTEN: The Road to Kosovo, Part II. “Albanian pro-Americanism resembles that of both Poland and Iraqi Kurdistan. The unspeakably oppressive communist regime pushed Albanians strongly into the U.S.-led Western camp, and the humanitarian rescue of Albanians in Kosovo from Slobodan Milosevic’s tyrannical despotism bolstered that sentiment even more.” Plus, a local who characterizes the European Union as “a big Yugoslavia.” Uh oh.

CAN A MAN BE RAPED BY A WOMAN? Actually, something very similar happened to a friend of mine in college. He felt he had been raped. In retrospect, I should have been more sympathetic.

UPDATE: Some related thoughts at Chicagoboyz.

I’M WRITING A SHORT PIECE ON HELLER FOR NORTHWESTERN, and something became clear to me as soon as I started writing: What’s most striking about Heller is that absolutely everybody — majority and dissents — says the Second Amendment protects an individual right.

It’s true that the dissenters’ view of that right is somewhere between “minimalist” (to be charitable) and “incoherent” (to be accurate). But nonetheless, all nine Justices specifically said the right is individual, and thus rejected the “collective right” position on the Second Amendment, a position that’s been the mainstay of gun-control groups, newspaper editorialists, and lower federal courts for decades, and one that was presented by those adherents as so obviously correct that those arguing for an individual right were called “frauds” and shills for the NRA.

Yet the collective right theory could not command a single vote on the Court when actually tested. It was, it seems, a paper tiger all along.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Statistics are a feminist issue.

SEBASTIAN MALLABY: Why politicians should leave energy markets alone. “Richard Nixon’s early-1970s price controls were a disaster. Administering the controls on energy alone took an estimated 5 million man-hours per year and punished motorists with gas lines. Repeating this experiment by clamping down on oil trading is like burning your hand on a gas stove and then sitting on a barbecue. . . . Nixon’s heirs forget that the ‘speculators’ they attack are often trying to reduce risk, not embrace it. Pension funds have piled into oil because they are trying to protect themselves from inflation. Small investors who load up on retail oil funds are mostly doing the same. I know my family will consume several thousand dollars’ worth of oil this year, so I logged on to Fidelity’s Web site and locked in my price. Does Congress think I’m irresponsible?” No, they just hope others are gullible.

JEFF JACOBY: “When it comes to gun control, the Democratic Party is a house divided against itself. That helps explain Barack Obama’s dizzyingly inconsistent positions on District of Columbia v. Heller, the landmark Second Amendment case decided by the Supreme Court last week.”

SOME FINAL THOUGHTS ON IRAQ, at retired-milblog 365 And A Wakeup.

OBAMA SUPPORTERS GETTING GOOGLE TO SHUT DOWN ANTI-OBAMA BLOGS?

UPDATE: “Previewing the Fairness Doctrine.”

IN THE WAKE OF DICKIE SCRUGGS AND MILBERG, WEISS, time for Congressional hearings? Good luck with that . . . .

UPDATE: Your legal system at work.

STRATEGYPAGE: “The United States now has thousands of spies inside Iraq. This didn’t happen overnight. . . . The ‘surge offensive’ of last year was largely possible because the informant network had grown to the point where commanders were confident that many Sunni Arab tribes were ready to switch sides.”

TAKE A BITE OUT OF CRIME: Judge Advises Crime Victim To Arm Herself After Attack:

General Sessions Court Judge Bob Moon said Friday that crime in Chattanooga “has become so rampant that it is no longer possible for the police department to protect our citizens.”

He told a woman who had been pulled from her car and beaten in the head that she or her mother needed to “purchase a weapon, obtain a gun permit and learn to protect yourself.” The woman moved back in with her mother after the May 4 incident on E. 17th Street.

Judge Moon said, “The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that all citizens have a right to purchase a weapon to defend themselves, their families and their homes – unless there is some disqualification that prevents them from owning a weapon.”

Read the whole thing.

OBAMA ON PRIZES: Not a flip-flop, but a straddle?

Declaring last week that he wanted to break the country’s oil jam by encouraging “heroic efforts in engineering,” John McCain called for the government to offer a prize — $300 million (a dollar an American) to the inventor of a battery so compact, powerful and inexpensive that it would supplement or even supplant the need for fossil fuels.

Barack Obama quickly derided the proposal — involving a sum equivalent to nearly 200 Nobel Prizes — as a gimmick and a distraction. But prizes are hard to resist. Mr. Obama’s own energy plan, posted on his Web site, suggests awarding them (in addition to tax incentives and government contracts) for ethanol research. But ultimately, he insisted, achieving energy independence will require a Kennedyesque effort like the one that put a man on the moon.

Plus this:

Considering the bureaucratic bog the space program has waded into — the exhilaration of Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind giving way to plumbing problems on the International Space Station — Mr. Obama might not have picked the best example. The latest pictures from Mars are stunning, but the most exciting thing to happen recently in manned space flight came in 2004 when Burt Rutan won the $10 million Ansari X Prize for the first privately backed suborbital excursion.

Winning the contest, which was named for its benefactors, the Ansari family, and administered by the nonprofit X Prize Foundation, cost more than the award was worth. (Mr. Rutan was backed by a Microsoft billionaire, Paul Allen.) But greater spoils may await, with Virgin Galactic licensing the technology for a space tourism industry.

This kind of leveraging is one of the selling points of sweepstakes science.

Yes, it is. And you’d think it’s the kind of new and exciting approach that a candidate of change would embrace, instead of harking back to what John F. Kennedy did about the time Barack Obama was busy being born. Read the whole thing.

Also, MSNBC’s Alan Boyle notes the increasing popularity of prizes in science, etc., among people who aren’t Barack Obama.

UPDATE: Reader Tim Morris writes: “Yes! NASA is just the model for long term energy independence! Just ask anyone at the Lunar Colony in the solar power satellite assembly operation. Oh, wait. . . .”