THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY will be monitoring the Internet. Richard Fernandez has thoughts.

P.R. GENIUS AT WORK! A web promoter helpfully copied me in on this email:

You asked why we do not submit to Instapundit. Actually, we do. And as recently as yesterday — the series on energy dependence. That site, seemingly a one-man show, is hard to fathom. Today, it is all the South Carolina primary; apparently there is no other subject of consequence in the world. Yesterday, when we posted the energy dependence piece, Instapundit ran such items as “Digital Cameras Galore”, “A NEW TREND IN CAR DESIGN: Vanishing ashtrays and cigarette lighters” (really important). And they (or he) somehow thought the following observation deserved our attention:

A Random Thought
Posted by Stephen Green on 24 Jan 2008 at 09:13 pm

It just occurred to me that one of these jokers — Clinton, McCain, Obama or Romney — is going to be the next President. It’s almost enough to make one pine for the old days of Bush v Gore.

Our piece is long for this crowd, maybe beyond the attention span of Insta’s audience. It seems to feature short items, and a lot of them frivolous.

Well, you can scroll down and decide for yourself whether this is an accurate characterization of the site. But was copying me on this email a smart PR move? Doesn’t seem that way to me. . . .

TERROR IN EUROPE: “Islamist extremists were planning attacks across Europe, especially against public transport, before their arrests in Barcelona last weekend, a Spanish paper reported on Saturday, citing a would-be attacker’s testimony.”

HOWARD BAKER endorses John McCain.

OUCH: “Lindsey Graham was on with Sean Hannity this evening and misrepresented Romney’s statement. Par for the course for this reprehensible politician. What post do you think a President McCain would offer Lindsey Graham? I’m guessing Attorney General or Supreme Court Justice. Maybe both, if McCain gets two terms.”

IN TODAY’S NEW YORK POST, I have a review of Tim Harford’s new book, The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World.

HITLER: Bloodthirsty dictator, die-hard Cowboys fan.

MEGAN MCARDLE ON FAT POOR PEOPLE:

There is little to no systematic evidence that poverty-linked undernutrition–malnutrition caused by too little food intake–is an actual problem in America. “Food insecurity” numbers batted around by the FDA do not mean that people actually went hungry; they mean that people worried about going hungry, or changed their diet–usually by altering the composition of the diet, not by forgoing food–to avoid going hungry. But of actual sustained hunger, there is no evidence.

There is, on the other hand, a lot of evidence of obesity among the poor; their obesity rate is estimated at 36%, and the obesity rate among poor children seems to be about twice the rate among non-poor children. The poor people are eating more calories than they need. Yet we propose to stimulate the economy by giving the poor money that can only be spent on more food.

But if you cede hunger as an issue, you lose political appeal.

UPDATE: Tom Maguire boldly defends food stamps.

CHINESE GIRL finds love in a kibbutz.

GAZA AND EGYPT: “If Israeli leaders had any p.r. sense and/or vision, they would use this opportunity to loudly ask why Egypt, which refused custody of Gaza when Israel returned the Sinai, is so adamant about refusing to do its part to relieve Palestinian suffering.”

PRAVDA: Yuri Gagarin was not the first cosmonaut.

Just the first who lived.

BILL BRADLEY POSTS SOME FINAL THOUGHTS ON SOUTH CAROLINA: “Bill Clinton may be responsible for Hillary’s wins in New Hampshire and Nevada. But in South Carolina, most voters said that his behavior was critical to their choice. And that proved to be a big negative.” Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: See also this post by Tom Maguire.

BEWARE THE CRASHING SATELLITE! “A large U.S. spy satellite has lost power and could hit the Earth in late February or March, government officials said Saturday.”

BILL QUICK’S ADVICE TO REPUBLICAN VOTERS: If you’re unhappy with the offerings, show your unhappiness by writing in Fred Thompson. “By doing so, you send a message that can’t be mistaken or spun.”

JOE GANDELMAN IS UNHAPPY WITH how the Clintons have conducted this campaign.

MICKEY KAUS: “Now that Bill Clinton has explicitly belittled Obama’s South Carolina victory by comparing it to Jesse Jackson’s, how does Obama’s share of the white vote compare with Jackson’s in 1988?”

UPDATE: More here: “The determining factor in how people voted was race. Not that this is a good thing — and really, I can’t see how any liberal would prefer Clinton to Obama — but that’s the way it went down today in South Carolina among Democratic voters.”

MORE: Obama in a Rout: “Clearly, Edwards needs to remain in the race so his message will be heard.”

Meanwhile, some Democratic pundits have figured things out.

And Dave Kopel says that Barack Obama sounds like a President.

And Mark Steyn thinks Obama is “Kennedyesque.”

TRAINING TO DEFEND AGAINST SMALLPOX ATTACKS: “However, it is considered unlikely that a terrorist organization would use smallpox, because it would probably quickly get back to impoverished Islamic countries, where treatment and vaccination would be much less likely. Thus, Islamic terrorists using smallpox would end up killing far more Moslems than Christians. But, then, terrorists have never been noted for their heavy use of logic.” Indeed.

OBAMA WINS SOUTH CAROLINA.

Stephen Green has been drunkblogging the coverage and reactions.

UPDATE: Hillary takes second, leaving Edwards coming in third in the state of his birth. Probably because of Hillary’s anti-Edwards robocalls.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Video and more.

MORE: Eric Scheie:

I Just finished watching Obama’s speech. Once again, I have to say that he is a great orator, a speaker with the ability to inspire. The best rhetorician I have seen (my B.A. is in Rhetoric and I say this as a compliment) since Ronald Reagan. His appeal is wide ranging, and his sincerity is obvious. While I am skeptical that he can overcome the entrenched Clinton machine, anything is possible.

I’m very impressed at his ability to go for the jugular in a respectful manner. He nailed the Clintons on their bullshit, and their racializing, yet he did so without a hint of an ad hominem attack.

I like that: “his ability to go for the jugular in a respectful manner.” We need more of that . . .

INTELLIGENT THERMOSTATS: Back during the brouhaha over California’s proposal — since withdrawn — to require that all thermostats be centrally controlled with no user control at all during a power emergency, I should have thought to check out Lynne Kiesling’s blog. She’s got a great post, pointing out that “Programmable Communicating Thermostats” that can take signals from the network are a great idea, but that thermostats that are centrally controlled, without user consent, are a terrible idea. Excerpt:

The PCT is the most cost-effective and forward-looking way to break down the monopoly that the distribution utilities currently have in providing retail electricity services to end-use customers. Without the PCT, a lot of dynamic pricing, product differentiation, and other market-based contracts and mechanisms are impossibly costly or simply not feasible. In conjunction with the two-way communicating meters (AMI) that the distribution utilities in California are installing, PCTs open the door to the type of retail choice and price-responsive end-use technologies that I discussed last week in my post about the GridWise Olympic Peninsula Project. Being able to program the thermostat to respond to signals, especially price signals, is a good thing. . . .

We do not yet have the evidence to indicate whether that responsiveness is likely to be enough to avoid most service interruptions, but that is no reason to resort to the use of such coercive force. If anything, the 2006 experience of one Stage 2 alert is an upper bound on the expected magnitude of the problem, and increased technology and voluntary participation in differentiated retail contracts will reduce that incidence even further.

Furthermore, from a marketing perspective, mandatory direct load control is a sure-fire way to make sure that consumers look at smart grid technologies with suspicion. Even if it were only on that grounds, I would oppose such a provision, because it taints all of the hard smart grid work that the GridWise Architecture Council and other groups have been doing.

There’s a lesson here. People should keep control of their gadgets. Lots of folks would enable this kind of thing in exchange for a break in their electric rates anyway, but making it mandatory gets their back up and makes people want to cheat just to stick it to the man. It also creates — as California found — a huge groundswell of opposition.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Perhaps, at some not too distant point in the future, we’ll have “intelligent” menus in restaurants, where we’ll only be offered the food that fits our health profile (as determined by the nanny state, of course). A little overweight? You get one set of offerings. High cholesterol? You get another. Diabetic? There’s a third set.

After all, with the state paying for health care, it has every right to keep an eye on what you eat. Ordering off someone else’s menu would, of course, be a crime.

As usual these days, reality runs ahead of satire.

DARKNESS AT NOON: More Palestinian / news media photo fakery. Really, it’s hard to believe anything the press reports on this subject, since they’ve made clear that they’re happy to knowingly pass along, and even help stage, lies on behalf of the Palestinians.

HILLARY’S MANEUVERS DON’T IMPRESS Josh Marshall. “The Clinton camp really needs to be shut down on this new gambit of theirs to muscle the party and the other candidates into seating the Michigan and Florida delegate slates.”

TUITIONS ARE HIGH, and people aren’t buying administrators’ stories: “To a certain degree, suspicion and distrust of colleges and universities are problems of the higher education sector’s own making. . . . The dominant meme describes American colleges and universities as institutions driven by their own self-interest rather than by the interests of students or of society.”

BILL BRADLEY IS REPORTING FROM SOUTH CAROLINA, with new posts as the day goes on.

10,000 PEOPLE SIGN UP FOR CHEVY VOLTS. That and more at this week’s Carnival of Cars.

SOUTH PARK on the two party system.