DAVID HARSANYI on the media and the “lying” game.

CARS POWERED BY NATURAL GAS: A T. Boone Pickens reality check. “There’s little need to spend major amounts of money to develop an all-new CNG vehicle, because there are plenty to be had already. Everything from city buses to fork lifts to passenger cars are available with CNG drivetrains right now. Honda sells the Civic GX, with a 170-mile range. Not only that, but there are many places that will convert your vehicle to run on CNG in addition to leaving the conventional fuel injection intact, so you can switch back and forth at will. You can even buy kits that let you do this yourself. Live too far from a CNG station? Buy Phill, a CNG compressor that hooks up to the city natural gas line already running your stove, furnace and water heater, then refuel yourself at home.”

THIS OBAMA DENIAL DOESN’T SOUND LIKE MUCH OF A DENIAL TO ME:

In the New York Post, conservative Iranian-born columnist Amir Taheri quoted Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari as saying the Democrat made the demand when he visited Baghdad in July, while publicly demanding an early withdrawal.

“He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington,” Zebari said in an interview, according to Taheri. . . .

But Obama’s national security spokeswoman Wendy Morigi said Taheri’s article bore “as much resemblance to the truth as a McCain campaign commercial.”

In fact, Obama had told the Iraqis that they should not rush through a “Strategic Framework Agreement” governing the future of US forces until after President George W. Bush leaves office, she said.

In the face of resistance from Bush, the Democrat has long said that any such agreement must be reviewed by the US Congress as it would tie a future administration’s hands on Iraq.

I’m not seeing a lot of daylight between what Taheri said and the Obama campaign’s response here.

UPDATE: Despite the weakness of Obama’s denial, Republicans and Bush Administration officials are casting serious doubt on the story.

DIDN’T THE BLOGOSPHERE HAVE THIS AL GORE HOUSEBOAT STORY AGES AGO?

Why, yes, yes it did.

OIL DROPS TO $92/barrel.

PAY NO ATTENTION TO the man behind the TelePrompter. (Thanks to reader Walter Sobchak for the link, and the phrase!)

NEWSPAPERS WORLDWIDE oppose a Google-Yahoo deal.

NEW YORK SUN: “New York is on its way to becoming a battleground in this year’s presidential election, with Senator McCain rapidly dissolving Senator Obama’s lead in the Empire State, according to a new poll.”

UPDATE: Reader Katie Kring writes: ‘Somehow, I don’t think this is what the Obama people envisioned when they dreamed up his ’50 state’ strategy.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: New Jersey?

PROGRESS FOR CIVIL RIGHTS IN D.C.: Semi-automatic handguns to become legal. “D.C. Council member Phil Mendelson says he will propose regulations Tuesday that would legalize semi-automatic handguns in the District because the stopgap legislation the council passed in response to a Supreme Court ruling ‘would not stand up to judicial scrutiny.'”

JOHN TIERNEY: Are men turning into slackers in Western nations? And if so, why?

TOM MAGUIRE: Blowing in the Wind.

SOEREN KERN: Anti-Americanism in Europe Fueled by Ignorance. “Those who know the least about America seem to hate it the most.” Thank state-controlled media for both.

AN UNIDENTIFIED SPACE OBJECT: “The object also appeared out of nowhere. It just wasn’t there before. In fact, they don’t even know where it is exactly located because it didn’t behave like anything they know. Apparently, it can’t be closer than 130 light-years but it can be as far as 11 billion light-years away. It’s not in any known galaxy either. And they have ruled out a supernova too. It’s something that they have never encountered before. In other words: they don’t have a single clue about where or what the heck this thing is.” Obviously, it must be an alien artifact.

HMM: “The failure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, setting in motion the biggest government bailout/takeover in U.S. history, brings a grim sense of fulfillment to competent economists. After all, what did people expect, that water would flow uphill forever? This financial mega-mess is the same sort of event as the collapse of the USSR’s centrally planned economy, another economically unworkable Rube Goldberg apparatus that was kept going, more or less badly, for decades before it fell apart completely. . . . Each of these time bombs has at least one element in common: it promises current benefits, often seemingly without cost; but if it must acknowledge a substantial cost, it places that burden somewhere in the distant future, where it will be borne by somebody else. From the standpoint of society in general, every such scheme is a species of eating the seed corn. . . . And are members of the public so dense that they will fall for such promises? Yes.”

TRYING TO silence the critics.

RUSTY SHACKLEFORD: All Al Qaeda’s Cyberspace Belongs To Us.

BLOG SCOOPS on the financial crisis at Lehman. Plus this observation: “The best thing we have going for us is that most Americans were not heavily invested in financial stocks, don’t have outrageous mortgages and have largely sat out the latest financial bubble. Provided we don’t make things worse with ill-advised government meddling, this could be a terrific re-evaluation about where wealth should be invested in our country. In short, unwinding the Wall Street boom should make us a healthier, better country.”

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: An email from Senator Jim DeMint’s office:

The Senate will likely vote tomorrow on Sen. DeMint’s amendment to the Defense Authorization bill. The amendment strikes Section 1002 that incorporates all of the secret earmarks written in committee reports, giving them the force of law even though they are not in the bill, not debated, not voted on, and not signed into law.

This “incorporation language” must be stopped.

– It effectively reverses the President’s Executive Order that Porkbusters pushed him to issue, which aims to stop secret, non-legislative earmarks dead in their tracks.

– It forces agencies to make funding decisions based on the instructions they get from committee staff who author these reports rather than on merit.

– It prevents Congress from debating and voting on earmarks, which is the only true form of transparency and accountability.

– It sets a dangerous precedent that will be repeated if it is not challenged and stopped.

Please also note that the GOP earmark reform task force created by Sen. McConnell recommended that all earmarks be written into our bills. That’s what the Constitution requires. The vote tomorrow on DeMint’s amendment will test Republican support for this principle.

If the amendment is adopted, the earmarks in the reports will become what Sen. Durbin famously described as just a “note to your sister” and will not be legally binding. Instead, government agencies will be able to spend these taxpayer funds on true national priorities, not special interest politics.

Sounds like a bad idea to me. If you have feelings on the subject, you might want to let your Senators know.

BOB SHRUM: McCain and Palin have peaked.

SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT THE WSJ’S STORY on alleged Palin earmarks. Related post here.

Meanwhile, I was watching Bill Whittle on Pajamas TV talking about this, and he was very strongly making the point that it’s a very different thing for a Governor to be accepting earmarks than it is for a Senator to be enacting them. I think that’s a valid point as far as it goes, but it has its limits. For example, if I were really lobbying my Senators for $50 million in earmarked funding to build the PorkBusters Museum in Knoxville, people might reasonably question the depth of my commitment to porkbusting, notwithstanding that I’m not a Senator. It’s not at all clear that Sarah Palin was doing anything like that, but if she were, it would undercut claims that she’s always exhibited an unwavering commitment to fighting earmarks.

CANADA’S KANGAROO COURT UPDATE:

Anyone who runs an online message board, from the lowliest vanity blogger to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, can be charged under federal human rights law if visitors to their site post hateful comments, according to the Canadian Human Rights Commission. . . . “If a message board owner can’t manage to ensure the content of the message board is complying with Canadian law, then the message board should not be operating,” she said.

Athanasios Hadjis, who is hearing the case on behalf of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, questioned whether this applies even to messages that appear briefly, and without the owners knowledge or consent. He used the example of the CBC, which operates several chat forums for readers to discuss news stories, and asked what would happen if a hateful message somehow got past automatic filters and live editors.

He alluded to allegations that CHRC investigators themselves have even posted controversial comments to gain the trust of the operators of target websites.

Good way to entrap people. Thanks, Canada, for making the term “human rights” sound like a synonym for Stalinism.

MICKEY KAUS: “Does MSNBC (Olbermann et. al) really want Obama to win? Won’t their ratings be higher in 2009 if they represent the angry opposition–as opposed to the disillusioned party in power? Just a thought. … This factor might cause them not to worry too much whether their exaggerated anti-Palin and anti-McCain theatrics actually help the Democratic ticket.”

STILL MORE on Charles Rangel’s scandals. “While republicans are demanding Pelosi remove Rangel, the Democrats are caught between getting rid of a problem that could come up in debates versus not wanting to alienate black voters who may think removing Rangel would be overkill.” With polls tightening in New York, that’s a real problem, I guess.

MEGAN MCARDLE: “Obama is seeking to blame the current crisis on the Bush Administration. This is high-test hooey. This was not some criminal activity that the Bush administration should have been investigating more thoroughly; it was a thorough, massive, systemic mispricing of the risk attendant on lending to people with bad credit. (These are, mind you, the same people that five years ago the Democrats wanted to help enjoy the many booms of homeownership.) Lehman, Bear, Merrill and so forth did not sneakily lend these people money in the hope of putting one over on the American taxpayer while ruining their shareholders and getting the senior executives fired. They got it wrong. Badly wrong. So did everyone else. . . . This kind of foolish grandstanding is not the change we need. It’s just more of the same.”

Given Obama’s close connections to Fannie Mae and Lehman, he shouldn’t press this issue too hard.

FROM KATIE GRANJU, a memo to the Democrats on Sarah Palin.