“I GUESS MAKING ONESELF VULNERABLE to two negative stories in forty years is the price of a lifetime of public service.”

LAWRENCE LESSIG’S RUN FOR CONGRESS. “The district, south of San Francisco, runs straight through the heart of Silicon Valley, where Mr. Lessig is considered a celebrity, though one who wears glasses and uses phrases like ‘net neutrality.'” If you’re “considered a celebrity,” doesn’t that make you a celebrity? Is there some deeper lever of genuine celebrity that I just don’t understand?

“IS JOHN MCCAIN BROKE?”

“JIM RUTENBERG, MARILYN W. THOMPSON, DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and STEPHEN LABATON all show the kind of journalistic chops that made Us such a must-read in doctor’s offices and lavatories around the world.” Says Captain Ed.

MAJORING IN MIRACLES. Did Obama get sick on the eve of the big debate? Does Huckabee think this is the miracle he’d been hoping for? Unlike Huck, I didn’t “major in miracles,” but like the Virgin Mary on the grilled cheese sandwich, these works are uninspiring.

Apparently John McCain’s Keating adventures weren’t the only time his personal connections became risky business for his political career:

Early in Senator John McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers.

A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

When news organizations reported that Mr. McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s client, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.

Mr. McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship. But to his advisers, even the appearance of a close bond with a lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee Mr. McCain led threatened the story of redemption and rectitude that defined his political identity.

It had been just a decade since an official favor for a friend with regulatory problems had nearly ended Mr. McCain’s political career by ensnaring him in the Keating Five scandal. In the years that followed, he reinvented himself as the scourge of special interests, a crusader for stricter ethics and campaign finance rules, a man of honor chastened by a brush with shame.

But the concerns about Mr. McCain’s relationship with Ms. Iseman underscored an enduring paradox of his post-Keating career. Even as he has vowed to hold himself to the highest ethical standards, his confidence in his own integrity has sometimes seemed to blind him to potentially embarrassing conflicts of interest.

McCain strikes me as a fundamentally honorable guy . . . so honorable that he doesn’t realize when he’s getting himself in a mess. Most politicians would do the risky things, but take more care not to get caught. I’m not sure whether this is a feature or a bug.

For more on McCain’s erstwhile iconoclasm, I highly recommend you watch/listen to Will Wilkinson interview Matt Welch, the editor of Reason magazine and the world’s greatest living libertarian expert on John McCain. His book on the topic is a highly interesting read.

Update: The McCain campaign is apparently responding. It’s a pretty wan non-denial denial, but I hear there’s more substantive rebuttal to come. CNN notes “This may end up being a story about the New York Times as about John McCain.” One does kind of wonder why they’re breaking an eight year-old story now.

WHO READS INSTAPUNDIT? Science nerds, apparently. I’m reading the email, and most of it is correcting Megan McArdle about the theory of evolution or getting on my case about how a lunar eclipse is a full moon. So I’ll try to serve up more science. Did you know some scientists in Italy figured out how to detect the G-spot using ultrasound? There, did I say that wrong?

A JOURNALIST FOR HEZBOLLAH’S Al Manar TV station was arrested and is accused of plotting a terrorist attack in Morocco, of all places.

RULES OF JOURNALISM: CNN tells its reporters how to write about Fidel Castro. “Please note Fidel did bring social reforms to Cuba – namely free education and universal health care, and racial integration. [sic] in addition to being criticized for oppressing human rights and freedom of speech.” Was he just criticized for oppressing human rights and freedom of speech, or did he actually, you know, oppress human rights and freedom of speech?

John Derbyshire is right: “Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.”

BRACE YOURSELF: Moqtada Al Sadr’s ceasefire between the Mahdi Army and the Americans is set to expire Saturday in Iraq. If he doesn’t renew it (and he might not), it will be bad news for him, bad news for us, and bad news for Iraq.

ALI ETERAZ writes on the secular resurgence at the expense of Islamists in Pakistan.

THE NYT HITS MCCAIN with a big rumor about his relationship with a female lobbyist: “Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself…”

EVERYBODY’S TALKING ABOUT SEMICOLONS.

BIG DEBATE IN AUSTIN TONIGHT TOMORROW NIGHT. Will Obama coast? Does Hillary have a plan? It seems like her only hope is to make something big happen tonight tomorrow night. Are you one of the lucky Austinites who got tickets? “There were more than 43,000 applications for the 200 tickets available to the public. Austinites had a better chance of scoring a free pass to all South by Southwest music events, or to a UT football game with Oklahoma, than they did getting into this presidential debate.” Anyway, I’ll be live-blogging it here on my home blog, where we always like new commenters. [ADDED: Sorry to screw up on my first day here, but the Austin paper I’m linking to has it wrong!]

HI, MEGAN, HI MICHAEL. Nice to be here with you again. I’ve been away all afternoon flying from Madison, Wisconsin — my usual home base — to Brooklyn Heights, where I’m a visiting professor at Brooklyn Law School this year. I’m especially glad to be back to my view of New York Harbor for tonight’s total eclipse of the moon. If the clouds behave I hope to have some nice photographs for all you Instapundit (and Althouse) readers. But don’t wait for the photographs. Find a vantage point and gaze. Or howl. Or whatever one does for a total eclipse. Not howl. That’s for the full moon. Maybe a hearty silent scream. You’ll have to wait until 2010 for the next opportunity.

A BOMB IN DENMARK completely destroyed a shop in Copenhagen following a week of rioting over cartoons and hash. Abe Greenwald comments in Commentary.

I HAVE A THEORY ABOUT THAT . . . From Reuters:

Florida education officials voted on Tuesday to add evolution to required course work in public schools but only after a last-minute change depicting Charles Darwin’s seminal work as merely a theory.

Presumably they are adding the same caveats to gravity and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

OUCH. “He’s here to defend Barack Obama and he had nothing to say. That’s a problem.”

I’ll say:

(H/T FamousDC)

THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO HMMMMM

Kriston Capps:

More people have personally seen or felt the presence of a ghost than approve President Bush’s job performance. Which is in the basement. Where the ghosts live.

Typical liberal garbage. George Bush’s approval ratings, however abysmal, are still higher than the number of people who have actually seen a ghost.

TEE-HEE! Percy Bysshe Maguire is on the march:

Hillarymandias

I met a pollster from an antique land,
Who said–“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand, one in Texas…., one near Canton,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose brow, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The electorate that mocked them, and the press that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Hillarymandias,
Look on my resume and campaign fundraising, ye fellow Democrats, and despair!
Nothing else remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away. Heh.

FIDEL CASTRO’S LEGACY debated on the left: Chris Bertram says “let’s hear it for universal literacy and decent standards of health care.” Armed Liberal says “ If the price of universal literacy is prison camps for writers, count me out.”

WILL WILKINSON ON HAPPINESS: “the fact that you think you know what’s best for me doesn’t mean I don’t really need my nose hair trimmer or my stuffed armadillo. I have my reasons.” The more detailed version is here.

Personally, they can have my stuffed armadillo when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Update A reader, whose name I omit to protect the innocent, emails:

I don’t need a nose hair trimmer, my friends and coworkers need me to have a nose hair trimmer. And they have let me know on occasion.

Faster than you can say “negative externality“, it’s consumer products to the rescue!

THESE ARE A FEW OF MY FAVORITE THINGS

Possibly the best book cover ever. The book’s pretty good too, of course.

LUNAR ECLIPSE TONIGHT. Depending on your location, you may be able to see a red moon. Unfortunately, my location will be on at my desk in DC, working.

APPARENTLY, THE NORTHERN ILLINOIS CAMPUS SHOOTER WAS TAKING PROZAC, XANAX, AND AMBIEN. This is being reported as if it were something ominous, perhaps the cause of the tragedy. This seems a little much. It’s not exactly shocking to find out that people who go on shooting sprees are often depressed, anxious types with difficulty sleeping.