STRATEGYPAGE ON CHINESE SPYING DURING THE BEIJING OLYMPICS:

In preparation for the August Olympic Games in Beijing, China has installed hardware and software in all hotels, to make it easier for state security to monitor foreign visitors that use the Internet. Some foreign owned hotels leaked the documents (orders from the Chinese government to install the systems) to U.S. government officials, who made it public. The foreign owned hotels in Beijing were threatened with closure if they did not comply.

Years ago, the Chinese government promised there would be open access to the Internet during the games. This despite the fact that the Chinese Internet is designed to be easily monitored by a huge (over 30,000 people) bureaucracy that does nothing but monitor Internet use (and imprisons those who say anything the state does not approve of.)

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has apologized to member nations for China’s failure to allow free access to the Internet during the games.

I won’t be going, and I don’t plan to watch. The Olympics are a fount of corruption and chicanery anyway, upholding no ideals and promoting no good ends anyway. Plus, they’re boring.

J.K. ROWLING’S The Tales of Beadle the Bard will be on sale this Fall.

POLITICO: “Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the Democrats adjourned the House and turned off the lights and killed the microphones, but Republicans are still on the floor talking gas prices. Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) and other GOP leaders opposed the motion to adjourn the House, arguing that Pelosi’s refusal to schedule a vote allowing offshore drilling is hurting the American economy. They have refused to leave the floor after the adjournment motion passed at 11:23 a.m. and are busy bashing Pelosi and her fellow Democrats for leaving town for the August recess. . . . Democratic aides were furious at the GOP stunt, and reporters were kicked out of the Speaker’s Lobby, the space next to the House floor where they normally interview lawmakers. ‘You’re not covering this, are you?’ complained one senior Democratic aide.”

Related video:

UPDATE: Reader Arthur Barie emails: “They told me that if George Bush was elected President, the ability of Congressmen to debate important policy matters would be taken away, and they were right.”

TODAY’S GALLUP DAILY POLL: Race Tied at 44%. Yesterday was Obama 45, McCain 44. Mostly statistical noise, but surely not encouraging to the Obama campaign. I’d advise the McCain campaign not to get too excited either, though.

24/7 SOLAR POWER by combining cheap electrolysis with solar power? Hope it pans out.

TOM MAGUIRE:

So who said this this back in late 2005?

“I don’t think I have a place in history yet. I got elected to the U.S. Senate. I haven’t done anything yet.”

That was the humble, grounded Barack Obama, newly elected to the US Senate. And what has he done in the Senate? Well his proposal to surrender to Al Qaeda in Iraq in January of 2007 was shot down. Otherwise, not much.

McCain could run a positive campaign emphasizing experience and his energy plan. Don’t ask Hillary how the experience thing went – she had a bad experience with experience because she lacked experience.

But on energy, McCain has something to please (or irk) everyone. Offshore drilling polls better than might have been expected in California, Obama can’t pronounce “nuclear”, and enviros know McCain has been a Senate leader on carbon cap and trade schemes (don’t tell righties).

Plus, all about the Benjamins: “Well, let’s see -the people on US currency are older, whiter, deader, and had a record of accomplishment, so there are a lot of differences here.”

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Pelosi: Save the Planet, Let Someone Else Drill.

UPDATE: Plus, why you need to be poor.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader points out that if Nancy Pelosi wants to “save the planet,” she should probably take the train home instead of flying in a greenhouse-spewing executive jet.

DON SURBER fact-checks the L.A. Times. Apparently those vaunted layers of editors and fact-checkers didn’t do much editing or fact-checking. Again. I think it’s mostly the editors, though, because the article doesn’t clearly distinguish between McCain supporters in 2000 and today. Plenty of people who supported him then don’t support him now, and vice versa.

GIVE THE CONSPIRACY THEORIES A REST, PLEASE: I mentioned earlier that the Insta-Wife has been locked out of her blog by Blogger. That’s happened to a lot of other people, and it’s given rise to various theories that it’s an anti-left, anti-right, even anti-catholic blog campaign. I think, though, that it’s just a Google glitch, and that people think that blogs like theirs are disproportionately affected because those are the blogs they read. Anyway, I’d advise not getting carried away.

UPDATE: This email from Miriam MIdkiff further undercuts the conspiracy theory approach:

You mentioned in your post that “quite a few other bloggers” are getting locked out of their Blogger accounts. Try hundreds, if not thousands. The Blogger help board is full of frustrated folks like myself.

I am a “genea-blogger”; a genealogy blogger. I had three of my six public blogs (I have eight total on Blogger) get locked out yesterday afternoon. Immediately, I submitted all three for review. My main one (http://ancestories1.blogspot.com) is an award-winning blog that I’ve had for a year and a half on Blogger with nearly 700 posts. It is one of the main genealogy blogs read in the blogosphere. My second one (http://ancestories2.blogspot.com) is a blog with journal prompts to help people write about their own lives for future generations. I don’t blog much there, and after a couple of hours, it was unlocked. The last is a blog I co-author with members of the Eastern Washington Genealogical Society (http://ewgs-spokane.blogspot.com). I was hoping to start our media releases this weekend for the upcoming 2009 Washington State Genealogical Society’s statewide conference to be held in Spokane. Currently there are 111 posts at that site.

I’ve heard from a couple of other genea-bloggers who also got locked out very recently. One who got locked several months ago still has a “warning” notice as a potential malicisous site posted when you access it using Mozilla Firefox as a browser, even though she has carefully followed all directions to “scrub” her site which supposedly had malicious software on it.

Many of us are ready to switch to WordPress. I wonder how long it will take before Blogger gets their act together and fixes the problem!

I don’t think that genealogy-bloggers have much of a political slant. [You naive fool! It’s to stop people from looking into Obama’s birth certificate! — ed. Ah, it’s all becoming clear now — a conspiracy so vast . . . .]

ANOTHER UPDATE: More good sense from Randy Neal.

PREVENTING FALLS with sensor-equipped electronic pants.

MEN IN SHORTS: Plus a response from the ultimate men-in-shorts critic, Ann Althouse. “I consider it a very poorly thought out article — shocking proof that the NYT passively observes fashion and lacks critical faculties. . . . If you’re not going to be an arbiter of taste, why are you writing fashion articles? Or is the truth that fashion criticism in the New York Times has devolved into pop culture reportage. Sad!“

RICK MORAN: Republicans Behind Bars: A Serio-Comic Parade of GOP Hooligans.

IN THE MAIL: Stephen Hunter’s new novel, Night of Thunder.

HMM: Gallup Daily: Obama 45%, McCain 44%.

HMM: “One of the nation’s top biodefense researchers has apparently taken his own life, just as the FBI zeroed in on him as a suspect in the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks.”

THANKS, GOOGLE: The Insta-Wife’s blog has been “locked” as a potential spam blog. She did the little challenge/response thing, so I guess it’ll be unlocked sooner or later, but it’s still irritating. To be fair, though, spam-blogs on Blogspot are a real problem.

UPDATE: I’m getting email reporting that this has happened to quite a few other bloggers.

ROGER SIMON: Is McCain peaking too early? “I expected McCain to be squeaking up behind Obama in mid-October at the best, not before August 1. This is supposed to be a Democratic year par excellence with the economy tanking (semi, anyway) and the Iraq War dragging on longer than the Peloponessian. (Okay, that baby ran 27 years, but you know what I mean.) Democrats also historically lap the field over the summer. Even such certified loxes as Dukakis and Mondale were ahead on Aug. 1. What’s going on here?”

UPDATE: Reader Steve Waite emails: “I don’t think MCCain is peaking – rather, Obama is sagging!” Well, he’s even getting criticism from the Hardball crowd. That can’t be good.

ERIC EGLAND in The New York Times: Allies Obama Overlooked. “We already have a counterterrorism partnership with the European Union. And it works. . . . In 2004, J. Cofer Black, the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism, testified about the success of these partnerships before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s subcommittee on European affairs. Had Senator Obama, who now heads that subcommittee, read the transcripts from the meeting, which took place before he came to office, or had he held a similar hearing, he might have known that the partnerships he called for last week already exist.”

FASTER, PLEASE:

For all who have wondered if they could enjoy the benefits of exercise without the pain of exertion, the answer may one day be yes — just take a pill that tricks the muscles into thinking they have been working out furiously. Researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego reported that they had found two drugs that did wonders for the athletic endurance of couch potato mice. One drug, known as Aicar, increased the mice’s endurance on a treadmill by 44 percent after just four weeks of treatment.

A second drug, GW1516, supercharged the mice to a 75 percent increase in endurance but had to be combined with exercise to have any effect.

“It’s a little bit like a free lunch without the calories,” said Dr. Ronald M. Evans, leader of the Salk group.

I work out regularly, and more-or-less enjoy it, but I’d replace it with a pill if I could.

LA SHAWN BARBER: Is Climate Change… Racist?

DROPPING THE BALL at The Huffington Post.

DAMSELS OF DEATH.

ABUSIVE LAB TEST: Four portable hard drives. Only one survivor.

URBAN AMERICA: A political monoculture:

Today, America’s urban areas have evolved into a political monoculture that increasingly resembles the “solid South” that provided a base for Democrats from the late 19th century to the 1960s. Since 1972, the year of the Nixon landslide, the Democratic share has grown 20 percent or more in most of the largest urban counties. . . .

Race and income levels do not explain the emerging urban mono­culture, because the cause lies elsewhere: in the evolution of cities over the past four decades. The shift began in the late 1960s, when urban regions, from financial centers such as New York and Chicago to old industrial cities such as Detroit and Cleveland, began to suffer a massive exodus of predominantly white, middle-class residents.

Read the whole thing. (Via Newsalert).

ANDREW MALCOLM: Where did Obama’s Mojo Go?

Something’s going on. Or some things.

A new CNN/Opinion Research poll out Wednesday shows that despite nine solid days of blanket media coverage from overseas with Barack Obama cheered by adoring throngs of Germans and parlez-vousing with the French, making a three-point shot in the Middle East and standing outside No. 10 Downing Street, the freshman Illinois Democratic presidential nominee to be Senator Barack Obama of Illinois stayed static in the polls despite his well-covered long foreign tripsenator is stuck right where he was in the polls before he left.

Read the whole thing.