WHY DO PEOPLE GO TO LAW SCHOOL? For the money! And because of thirst for power. Hey, do it right and they go together . . . .

ED MORRISSEY IS MOVING TO HOT AIR. I’m sure that’s a good thing, but I’ll miss his blog.

HAROLD ICKES’ new love for superdelegates.

THE HAZARDS OF politically correct research.

GUNS IN THE DESERT: Michael Totten posts another report from Iraq.

FOLLOWING THE MONEY IN THE REZKO AFFAIR: Mansion ‘mistake’ piles the pressure on Barack Obama. Seems The Times of London is more interested in covering this story than the American news media are, for some reason.

UPDATE: The story certainly seems to have legs in the blogosphere.

INSTAPUNDIT’S IRAQ CORRESPONDENT REPORTS on the man with the hardest job in the world.

REVIEWING THE REVIEWERS: A roundup of book reviews from this weekend’s newspapers.

SELF-REPAIRING RUBBER: The condom-related applications alone are staggering . . . .

OKAY, THIS IS COOL: Air-Powered Car Coming to U.S. in 2009 to 2010.

The Air Car caused a huge stir when we reported last year that Tata Motors would begin producing it in India. Now the little gas-free ride that could is headed Stateside in a big-time way.

Zero Pollution Motors (ZPM) confirmed to PopularMechanics.com on Thursday that it expects to produce the world’s first air-powered car for the United States by late 2009 or early 2010. . . .

We’ll believe that when we drive it, but MDI’s new dual-energy engine—currently being installed in models at MDI facilities overseas—is still pretty damn cool in concept. After using compressed air fed from the same Airbus-built tanks in earlier models to run its pistons, the next-gen Air Car has a supplemental energy source to kick in north of 35 mph, ZPM says. A custom heating chamber heats the air in a process officials refused to elaborate upon, though they insisted it would increase volume and thus the car’s range and speed.

“I want to stress that these are estimates, and that we’ll know soon more precisely from our engineers,” ZPM spokesman Kevin Haydon told PM, “but a vehicle with one tank of air and, say, 8 gal. of either conventional petrol, ethanol or biofuel could hit between 800 and 1000 miles.”

Bring it on!

HMM: Bush Predicts GOP Will Hold White House.

I THOUGHT ONLY ARROGANT REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTS DID THIS: Obama stiffs, stifles national press.

TAR AND FEATHERS ARE CALLED FOR, AT A MINIMUM, BUT THIS IS A START: Iranian shoppers riot against the “modesty police.” Video at the link.

IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, David Brooks attacks the “Democratic chorus” on McCain, but neglects to mention Bill Keller.

IN BRITAIN, a serious brain drain.

BARACK OBAMA’S NEGATIVES: Higher than you’d think from reading the press coverage. Doesn’t seem to be helping Hillary all that much, though.

PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE: “There was a time when the Clinton machine was justly feared for its ruthlessness and adeptness at the politics of personal destruction. But now they’re just sad and lame. Maybe even the Clinton machine is suffering from Clinton fatigue!”

Plus, how low will Hill go? “Next the Clinton camp will accuse Obama of fathering a black child in wedlock.”

And, is Hillary depressed? Wouldn’t you be?

HOME AGAIN, HOME AGAIN, JIGGITY-JIG: I’m back. Regular blogging will resume tomorrow. Thanks to the “Dream Team” of guestbloggers, Ann Althouse, Megan McArdle, and Michael Totten. I think that InstaPundit is better when I’m away!

WHERE’S GLENN? I think he’s coming back tonight….

Photo by Chris.

A LETTER FROM A READER: “I have a friend who is a public-sector psychiatrist. She tells me that the free samples are the only thing that keeps her patients going. Yes, there are government programs BUT they refuse to pay for the latest medication, because the older stuff (which is less effective and has more side effects) is cheaper. The bean counters for drug costs are different from the bean counters for costs of mental committments, hence the first don’t care that they’re shooting up the costs of the second. Overall it winds up costing more, since a committment is lot more expensive that pills, but welcome to Michael Moore’s idea of a medical system.”

HARMLESS? An oldie but a goodie from Julian Sanchez on moral responsibility and collective action.

MY POST ON PHARMA triggered some emails complaining that drug companies spend more money on advertising than R&D. I blogged about this a while ago:

People who think that there is a gigantic pool of capital that could be sucked out of the pharmaceutical advertising budget are being misled by accounting terminology. People who rail against the pharmaceutical industry are fond of noting that about 20% of industry revenues go to marketing, with the implication that this is all wasted on advertising baldness cures during Golden Girls reruns. But just the top ten firms in the pharmaceutical industry took in about $350 billion in revenue in 2007, 20% of which is $70 billion. The entire US expenditure on advertising by all companies in all media forms totaled something like $150 billion in 2007. I know it seems like every other commercial you see is for Botox, but most advertising is not done by pharmaceutical firms.

In fact, advertising is only a small fraction of that marketing expense. Over half of it expense consists of free samples, the offering of which seems to me like an unalloyed public good.

KAPHTOR ON CUBA “I might add that the US tends to get blamed for both dictators, which just goes to show, in the minds of some people, it doesn’t matter whether we support third rate leaders like Batista, or oppose third rate leaders like Allende, when they fall to a coup within their own country, it’s America’s fault. It also doesn’t matter whether we embargo them or trade like crazy with the subsequent junta, the policy it to blame for the continuing plight of the people. And it doesn’t matter whether we gently show the dictator the door, or shake our fist at him in his dotage, we don’t get much credit.”

THE LOGIC OF COLLECTIVE ACTION Will Wilkinson asks whether it’s useful to refrain flying in order to prevent global warming. Answer: no. Any one consumer’s demand will not impact the level of carbon emitted, just as no consumer who refrains from eating meat will actually cause the amount of meat consumed to fall; the random mismatch in the supply and demand in your local market for chicken will far exceed the number of chickens you might have eaten for any time frame you choose.

So why do it? To create a cultural norm about carbon emissions, or chicken eating, says Will. I have a different intuition, which is that if you want everyone to do something, you are morally bound to do it whether or not they follow suit. I am rethinking that–but I have a sense that those sorts of illogical bourgeois committments to virtue are precisely what allow us to overcome collective action problems without coercion.

MARKETING GONE MAD I defend the pharmaceutical companies a lot here, and with good reason; they produce lifesaving drugs. More please! Nonetheless, one criticism I don’t see made enough is that pharmaceutical companies don’t seem to realize that they can’t sell pills the way you sell detergent. For starters, the things do have side effects that could kill people, so you shouldn’t try to persuade people to take drugs they don’t need. But from a purely selfish perspective, any company that is seen to be mixing the profit motive too closely with our health care will eventually get sentenced to death by the court of public opinion. Derek Lowe has more:

I agree that Merck is still doing some excellent science, as they always have. And they still have a lot of good people there, as they always have. Those aren’t the problems. And they’re still introducing some innovative drugs, arguably more than a lot of other companies, and that’s not the problem, either. These are all are admirable things.

And Vioxx, as I said here at the time, was not, in my opinion, necessarily a bad drug. It and the other COX-2 inhibitors have a real place in the pharmacopeia. The problem is that Merck – or, to put the usual face-saving perspective on it, Merck’s marketing department – oversold the stuff. The prospect of an aspirin-sized market was too much for them to resist, so the company pushed Vioxx just about as hard as they possibly could.

Yep, Vioxx was for all kinds of patients, all kinds of pain, all the time – and under those conditions, whatever side effects were there were finally revealed. It’s the company’s bad luck (not to mention the bad luck of their patients) that those effects were as potentially severe as they were. Even so, the increased risk of a heart attack with Vioxx use is extremely small in any absolute sense. For people with severe pain who can’t get relief with other drugs, I think a COX-2 inhibitor is absolutely worth it.