IT JUST GETS WORSE: “Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign is trying to clarify comments by former President Clinton that seemed to question Barack Obama’s patriotism – comments an Obama aide likened to Joseph McCarthy.”

GEE, THINK THE CHINESE ARE BEHIND THIS? Cyber-attacks against Tibetan communities.

SO “PASSPORTGATE” LEADS BACK TO THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN? “The State Department investigation of improper computer access to passport records of three presidential candidates is focusing on one remaining employee — a contract worker with a company headed by an adviser to the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama.” I suspect this is a case of idle curiosity and coincidental connections — but had the coincidental connection been with the McCain campaign, people would be making a big deal out of it.

UPDATE: More: Chief of firm involved in breach is Obama adviser.

MORE: Reader Michael Gebert emails: “I heard they found out from McCain’s passport file that as a young man, he spent several years in a Communist capitol. And with no entry stamp!”

“AS DRAG RACES GO, YOU WILL AGREE, this is quite a good one.”

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL on the Second Amendment and the Heller case:

Judging by Tuesday argument, the High Court has a majority in support of the circuit court opinion. Chief Justice John Roberts asked why the Framers included the word “people” if the Amendment only applied to militias. Justice Antonin Scalia discussed the importance the Framers attached to providing citizens the means to protect against tyrannical government. Justice Anthony Kennedy, often the Court’s swing vote, informed all in attendance that “In my view, there’s a general right to bear arms quite without reference to the militia either way.” . . . We hope the Supreme Court agrees with Judge Silberman that the Second Amendment does protect the right to own pistols, rifles and other guns of the kind the American Founders believed were needed to protect liberty.

Indeed.

THEY QUIT EMAILING ME LINKS, but here’s the latest Grand Rounds.

I NOTED EARLIER that Jericho has been cancelled, and some people aren’t at all surprised:

Many of you have lamented the disastrous left-turn the television series Jericho took last season. Well, it was awarded with spectacularly low ratings and now cancellation.

A military reader emails with similar sentiments:

Just saw your post on Jericho’s cancellation and think the producers have no one to blame but themselves. I liked the first season, but the 2nd season has gone off the rails. Let me count the way:

1. The bombs were an old white guy conspiracy set in motion by facist conservatives and a big, bad corporation. God forbid that they say it was a foreign power or terrorists, nooooooo.

2. As a soldier, I found it very offensive that the military is now the oppressing enforcer. How many times I have seen what was happening in the show and saying, “There’s no way we’d do that.” Jake’s interrogation, not punishing Getz, shooting at civilians for violating “curfew.” The list goes on and on.

3. So many holes in the military aspect that it was pathetic. Here’s the most obvious – MAJ Beck says he’s from the 10th Mountain Division, but they’re stationed at Ft. Drum, NY. In order to join with the ASA military, wouldn’t he have had to have sought them out by finding a way across the “blue line?”

This was possibly the most offensive aspect, as if we would just throw allegiance to some new government outside of the constitutional line of succession in Cheyenne, under a new flag and new name. Pray tell why we wouldn’t have fallen in line with whoever actually had succession, since the entire line is never together in the same city because of just such a possibility. It’s not like we would have said, “ASA, USA, no big difference.”

In short, who wants to watch a show that denigrates their country, denigrates their military, and seems to blame the possible evils of the world on corporations? Wouldn’t a show about how we pulled together and united against an external threat been a little more palatable?

Not to Hollywood in an election year, I guess.

UPDATE: Reader Ed Stephens emails:

I echo your other reader’s comments about the reason for Jericho’s demise. Perhaps only blue staters could imagine that scattered nukes would cause the dissolution of the United States. That American’s would suddenly decide they need a “new” constitution? Personally, I would have liked to see more emphasis on the recovery efforts, setting up windmills, solar power, etc (now that the bureaucracies hindering it were gone). Think Gilligan’s island/McGuyver on steroids highlighting “yankee ingenuity” and Heinlein’s quote about specialization.

A more probable scenario would involve an invasion by Mexico into CA, AZ, NM and Texas (if not UT and CO) to capitalize on a weakened US; but I’m sure that would be too un-PC.

CBS’s “THE UNIT” also similarly went off the rails the same way, but maybe Mamet’s turn from liberal orthodoxy will cause it to change.

Have not these people learned anything from “24”?

Indeed. Related thoughts here.

A BIG ROUNDUP of Apple news, including a picture of a MacBook Touch. I’ll believe it when I see the hardware.

“CRUCIFIXION FOR YOU?” “No thanks, it might be too disturbing for pre-schoolers.”

Mark Steyn comments: “So now the story ends with the Last Supper – and presumably afterwards Jesus and His friends watch Elmo and then go to bed. That the foundational event of your faith is now excessively ‘disturbing’ is almost too parodic a reductio of the Wimp Christianity of the mainline churches.”

UPDATE: Reader Greg Kemnitz emails: “A passion play without the Passion! How postmodern…”

A VERY ROUGH FIRST WEEK for New York’s new Governor.

WELCOME TO Planet Clinton! If it’s not to your liking, try Planet Olbermann!

ENJOYING SPRINGTIME IN MINNESOTA: It’s sunny and warm here.

UPDATE: But if you believe this, I could be chilly in the future: “No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you’d expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years.”

MORE PHOTOS AND REPORTING from the New York Auto Show.

ARTHUR C. CLARKE ON THE FUTURE: “Don’t panic!”

TIBET SUPPORTERS MARCH IN INDIA. Meanwhile, China vows to crush Tibet’s independence movement.

YOUR OWN PERSONAL JESUS. Believe again.

IN THE MAIL: James Bessen & Michael Meurer’s Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk. Personally, I think that the patent system has fallen far, far away from its original purpose of promoting “progress in science and the useful arts,” and become largely another case of special-interest legislation and generalized rent-seeking. This is something that Rob Merges and I wrote about a while back.

KARL ROVE, MacHead:

NB: All right, I’ve got just one more quick question for you. Last time I saw you, you’d just gotten an iPhone. How’s that working out for you?

ROVE: I love it. My life has changed. I have a shred of coolness. I’ve got my 3,500 people in my addressbook on the phone, I can sync my calendar. I keep track of my modest little stock investments. I can check the weather of my house in Washington, my house in Florida, my boy at school, my hunt-lease in south Texas. I can surf the web, I’m just–I get part of my email there.

I mean it is just shocking how much better, how much more productive I am. I no longer carry around a giant address book, if I don’t have my calendar close at hand, I can quickly check it out of my– I don’t have to carry, I used to carry several notecards, now it’s just as easy to scribble on my little notepad, I can take photographs and forward them on immediately, it’s just remarkable.

NB: All right. Well it sounds like Steve Jobs should call you up as a spokesman.

ROVE: There we go, there we go. And not only that, I also have the Mac Book Air which is really cool. Even my wife is jealous of my MacBook Air.

Perhaps a lucrative spokesperson gig is in his future.

INTERESTING QUOTE ON IRAQ:

Is Iraq the last country we confront in the Middle East?

Who wants to volunteer to get cross-ways with us? We’ll be there a century, hopefully. If it works right.

From Obama’s military adviser.

AN INSPIRING SPEECH TO AMERICA that just might save IowaHawk’s candidacy.

CLINTON, OBAMA, and the Hawaiian quid pro quo.

WOW: “Scientists have detected an interstellar explosion so bright that it was briefly visible to the naked eye—from 7.5 billion light-years away. . . . GRB 080319B, located more than halfway across the visible universe, crushes the previous record holder for most distant object visible without assistance by three orders of magnitude. That would be the galaxy M33, located just 2.9 million light-years from Earth.” Glad not to have been closer.

TOM MAGUIRE on our non-conversation about race.

CBS HAS cancelled Jericho.

EMILY YOFFE: Forget Juno. Out-of-wedlock births are a national catastrophe. I blame Ingrid Bergman.

UPDATE: Reader Christian Southwick emails:

Regarding your Emily Yoffe/Out-of-Wedlock Births post, did you mean Candice Bergen (of Murphy Brown fame) rather than Ingrid Bergman?

I’m not being a smartass, I’m seriously asking . . . is there some Bergman cultural reference that I am unaware of?

Why yes, yes there is. Ingrid Bergman became pregnant by Roberto Rossellini in 1949 and bore his child out of wedlock in 1950. (See this Wikipedia entry for a summary). Her career was more or less ruined in America for many years as a result. This was all long before I was born, but my sense is that despite the backlash, in retrospect this is the point at which attitudes toward out-of-wedlock motherhood began to shift.