IN THE MAIL: After the War on Crime: Race, Democracy, and a New Reconstruction. The thing about the War On Crime, though, is that unlike the War On Poverty and the War On Drugs it pretty much worked.

RASMUSSEN: “The belief that reporters are trying to help Barack Obama win the fall campaign has grown by five percentage points over the past month.” Gee, do you think? Plus this: “A separate survey released this morning also found that 50% of voters believe most reporters want to make the economy seem worse than it is. A plurality believes that the media has also tried to make the war in Iraq appear worse that it really is.”

FANNIE AND FREDDIE’S ENABLERS:

In the strange accountability of Washington, the same folks who put taxpayers on the hook for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are now demanding ransom to let taxpayers bail them out. It’s as if Andy Fastow insisted that Enron shareholders pay his fines after his fraud cost them their life savings.

“I don’t know how in good conscience you come up here and ask me to give unlimited lines of credit” to Treasury for Fannie and Freddie without giving Democrats something in return, Senate Banking Chairman Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.) told the Journal last week. Come again? This is the same Chris Dodd who long resisted tougher regulation while more recently handing Fan and Fred even more room to expand their risk-taking.

Not to mention getting a sweetheart “Friends of Angelo” mortgage deal. Hard to argue with this point: “In any other business, Mr. Dodd would be begging forgiveness.” Or facing indictment.

ON THE OTHER HAND, IT BEATS DYING: “Chinese officials insist the notorious Beijing air will be cleaner by August, making such contraptions unnecessary. Concerned about the pollution, the U.S. Olympic Committee is distributing a high-tech mask, developed in secrecy, to its more than 600 Olympians. If athletes deploy it, they risk insulting the hosts. Then there’s the geek factor.”

CREATIVE DESTRUCTION? Whirlwind Created By Biofuels Is Good Chaos. I certainly agree that non-food-based biofuels are the future. Corn-based ethanol is justifiable, if at all, only as a bootstrapping measure.

ROGER COHEN: “Barack Obama has already won the U.S. election by a landslide. In Europe, that is. Polls show the French putting the first African-American in the White House with 86 percent backing. Obamania is about as intense in Germany and Britain, the two other European countries the Senator will visit this week.”

If they’ll start paying U.S. taxes, I’ll think about giving them a vote . . . .

VIDEO: Tom Brokaw asks Al Gore about his personal energy consumption. My observation is that Al Gore is looking (and sounding) more and more like a Baptist televangelist all the time.

LOWRY AND PONNURU: What McCain should do, if he wants to win.

MORE HURRICANE-BLOGGING, at Brendan Loy’s new Weather Nerd blog.

MICHAEL TOTTEN: The bin Ladens of the Balkans. Remember, he’s supported by donations. So if you like his work, consider hitting the tipjar.

SMALL, CHEAP LAPTOPS — OH NOOO!

The personal computer industry is poised to sell tens of millions of small, energy-efficient Internet-centric devices. Curiously, some of the biggest companies in the business consider this bad news. In a tale of sales success breeding resentment, computer companies are wary of the new breed of computers because their low price could threaten PC makers’ already thin profit margins.

I’ve tested the Asus — both 7″ and 9″ — and the HP Mini-Note. All are good, though the Mini-Note with XP would be better.

MORE ON THE MYSTERIOUS MALIKI TRANSLATION SHIFT, from Mickey Kaus.

A FLU WARNING:

The world is failing to guard against the inevitable spread of a devastating flu pandemic which could kill 50 million people and wreak massive disruption around the globe, the Government has warned.

In evidence to a House of Lords committee, ministers said that early warning systems for spotting emerging diseases were “poorly co-ordinated” and lacked “vision” and “clarity”. They said that more needed to be done to improve detection and surveillance for potential pandemics and called for urgent improvement in rapid-response strategies.

The Government’s evidence appeared in a highly critical report from the Lords Intergovernmental Organisations Committee, which attacked the World Health Organisation (WHO) as “dysfunctional” and criticised the international response to the threat of an outbreak of disease which could sweep across the globe.

And these weaknesses, alas, apply to the overall infectious disease response, not just flu. Of course, that a U.N. agency like W.H.O. is “dysfunctional” is no big surprise, though W.H.O. was for a long time one of the few bright spots in the U.N.’s constellation of dysfunctional organizations.

JERRY POURNELLE: “T Boone Pickens is absolutely right: we can’t go on transferring a trillion a year to the middle east. On the other hand, we used to be the creditor nation of the world, as well as the manufacturing nation. We gave that up voluntarily for regulations and a regulatory state. Whether his conclusion, that we ought to convert to wind power, is correct is another matter. It doesn’t look as useful as nuclear, but there are fewer environmental fanatics opposed to wind. I suspect that energy economics is more determined by law suits than by engineering.”

That’s a poor basis for policy.

QUESTIONS ABOUT DNA EVIDENCE:

State crime lab analyst Kathryn Troyer was running tests on Arizona’s DNA database when she stumbled across two felons with remarkably similar genetic profiles.

The men matched at nine of the 13 locations on chromosomes, or loci, commonly used to distinguish people. The FBI estimated the odds of unrelated people sharing those genetic markers to be as remote as 1 in 113 billion. But the mug shots of the two felons suggested that they were not related: One was black, the other white.

In the years after her 2001 discovery, Troyer found dozens of similar matches — each seeming to defy impossible odds.

As word spread, these findings by a little-known lab worker raised questions about the accuracy of the FBI’s DNA statistics and ignited a legal fight over whether the nation’s genetic databases ought to be opened to wider scrutiny.

The FBI laboratory, which administers the national DNA database system, tried to stop distribution of Troyer’s results and began an aggressive behind-the-scenes campaign to block similar searches elsewhere, even those ordered by courts, a Times investigation found.

At stake is the credibility of the compelling odds often cited in DNA cases, which can suggest an all but certain link between a suspect and a crime scene.

Read the whole thing. That these matches occur is not as statistically shocking as the above makes it sound, but the big news is that the FBI is trying to silence these reports. This sort of behavior undercuts trust in other scientific evidence as well.

And — as a general rule — scientific evidence usually turns out to be less trustworthy upon experience than its proponents claim initially. And it’s not unusual for those proponents to try to squelch evidence that they’ve oversold. This, however, seems like it would justify a Congressional investigation.

UPDATE: More on this from David Kaye.