AIDS VIRUS TURNS OUT TO BE a century old. Worrisome question: What other nasty bugs are lurking out there, waiting to suddenly break out into the world?

I don’t know, but it’s a reason for working hard on advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology, so that we’ll be ready when they do. And that’s leaving aside the threat of biological warfare or terrorism. We’ve been neglecting public health for too long. Yeah, I’ve been beating this drum for a while, but it’s just as important as it was — and we’re still not doing enough.

UPDATE: Reader Rob Crawford writes:

Actually, I would argue that we haven’t neglected public health in terms of funding — we’ve just let it get turned towards other matters that aren’t, strictly speaking, public health. Gun control, diet, smoking, exercise — all HEALTH related, arguably, but not PUBLIC HEALTH matters. I don’t know if it’s because of the politics of the people involved, or if it’s just a matter of traditional public health issues not being “exciting” enough, but it sure would be nice if fewer tax dollars went to political crusades masking as health issues and more went towards educating people about vaccinations, basic sanitation, etc.

Back in the 1970s, it was widely believed that infectious disease had been conquered, which naturally led public-health types to look for other work. That belief turned out to be tragically erroneous, but that “other work” has continued as people found that it was easier, safer, and less “icky” than actually dealing with sick people and their environments. And yes, that needs to be turned around by redirecting funding. Unfortunately, the “social” style of public health pleases political activists and foundations who find helping to prevent disease insufficiently “relevant.”

WELL, GOOD: Blount Marine’s widow granted visa to have baby in U.S. “Hotaru Ferschke, the 24-year-old Japanese widow of a U.S. Marine sergeant killed in Iraq, has been granted a temporary visa to come to America and have her baby.”

OBAMA BUYS OWN SATELLITE CHANNEL: Good thing he hasn’t reinstated the Fairness Doctrine yet!

But how can he afford it?

A VICE-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE WHO CAN’T ANSWER KATIE COURIC’S QUESTIONS:

Those excerpts from Couric’s interviews give me more concerns about Biden than Palin. He seems to be under the impression that there’s a “liberty clause” in the Fourteenth Amendment (he has talked about it in Supreme Court confirmation hearings too). He misdescribes what Roe held. He seems to believe that Roe has been good for social peace and that this alleged fact justifies it as constitutional law.

Nobody’s perfect. Especially nobody in politics. . . .

NOT JUST AN AMERICAN PROBLEM: France seeks €300bn rescue fund for Europe.

WITH SWEETENERS: The bailout bill has passed the Senate. Before it’s all over, we’ll probably wish that Monday’s bill had passed instead — giving Congress more time to add their gimmes probably hasn’t produced a better bill.

SURPRISE: Fact check: Biden spins a helicopter tale.

BECAUSE CONGRESS CAN’T KEEP ITS FOCUS ON THE NATION’S WELFARE: The bailout bill — once three pages long — is now the length of a novel and larded with “sweeteners.”

If McCain were smart, he’d be running against Congress in general, and Pelosi and Reid in particular.

FROM ERIC POSNER, some very interesting thoughts on the political psychology of crisis. With an interesting followup post here.

UPDATE: Some related thoughts here.

EARLIER, I promised some thoughts on what to do about the news media’s outright campaigning for Obama. (And that’s what it is. Media bias used to mean that they would slow-walk stories that reflected badly on their candidate; now they just flat out ignore them, or even try to shoot them down. They’re not just in the tank, they’re functioning as arms of the campaign, and Obama’s strategy shows that he knows that and is relying on it.)

So various readers have been asking what I think people should do. For example, reader Steven Murray writes:

Do you subscribe to Newsweek magazine? I do and my sister told me that I should cancel the subscription. She says that since that magazine is so deep in the tank for Obama, I am just subsidizing his campaign and the Democratic party. You know, I think she has a point. If more conservatives, libertarians, and Republicans canceled their subscriptions to these types of publications, maybe then they would take notice.

I doubt it. Most of these general-circulation magazines are in fact niche products serving their version of the NPR demographic (and, in Newsweek’s case, doctor’s offices). By all means, if you don’t like them, cancel your subscription. People have been doing that for years, and it does have an effect — look at the plummeting viewership of network news programs.

You can also write them, and their advertisers, and complain. This does some good, but it’s usually temporary. As soon as the heat’s off, they go back to their old ways. It’s the only thing that’s likely to do much good between now and the election, though.

But if you really want improvement over the longer term, you need to support competition that isn’t an arm of the Democratic Party. The New York Sun folded yesterday. It was a serious, right-leaning newspaper in New York City. It was undercapitalized, and its shutdown is probably symptomatic of what’s going to happen to a lot of bigger newspapers soon, but if even a fraction of the people who are unhappy with the Times had subscribed it would still be in business. And, still, while the New York Times gets in deeper trouble, the New York Post seems to be doing fine.

If you want to have a media environment that isn’t dominated by the Gwen Ifills and Keith Olbermanns of the world, you need to ensure that other kinds of voices flourish. That means supporting the alternatives with your eyeballs, your subscriptions, your advertiser-patronage (and you could write those advertisers and tell them you’re happy that they’re supporting that kind of programming, too — they probably don’t get many letters like that, so they’ll be noticed) — basically, your money. Businesses need money to flourish. There’s a vast underserved population out there, for news, entertainment, movies, etc., and if people start serving it, the current “mainstream” media won’t be so mainstream anymore. So if you’re unhappy with current offerings, put your money where your mouth is.

And if you’re one of the people with creative interests, start making alternative stuff. Not just news and punditry, but entertainment, documentaries, etc. If An American Carol does well this weekend, it’ll make it a lot easier for the next film of its type to be made. If Evan Coyne Maloney’s documentary work does well, it’ll encourage a lot more of that kind of work.

Think of it like cultivating a garden: Starve the weeds, feed the flowers. Like gardening, it’s work. But like gardening, if you do the work you’ll see results.

MORE PROGRESS with cheap solar power. Faster, please!

A SALE ON OUTDOOR POWER EQUIPMENT, including free shipping on generators. I really need to get one of those . . . .

UPDATE: Reader Kevin Chustz emails:

I suggest you look here for better deals:

http://www.electricgeneratorsdirect.com/brand/guardian.php

My friend put a 7,000 watt natural gas standby generator in his mother in-law’s house and it performed perfect during hurricane Ike. I would personally put in a 17,000 to 20,000 watter to run everything in the house, including the central air. The great thing about these models is their automatic operation during an outage. No worries about going outside during a storm or other event.

You will have to hire a professional electrician for installation and maybe get a permit, but believe me, these generators are quieter and there are no extension cords snaking through your house while your using them.

I’ve actually thought of that. It’s not cheap, but it’s not as expensive as I had thought.

THOUGHTS ON ACADEMICS and getting your hands dirty: “Where the skin does come off my nose is when some of these professors, very senior in their fields and thus likely to take a back seat to nobody, get themselves put in charge of campus events and projects. Some of these folk shouldn’t be charged with organizing a church bake sale. They apparently can think abstractly, but they can’t think concretely. And the concrete world is where things happen (or fail to).”

I’LL BE ON PJTV this evening around 6:30, talking about media bias, energy policy, and events of the day. It’ll be the first use of the new HD camera setup in my basement.

A REPORT, INCLUDING VIDEO, on the opening of Oak Ridge’s new “uranium fortress.”

ON GWEN IFILL: Karl Bade writes:

As a co-author of The Appearance of Impropriety, I’m wondering whether you think Gwen Ifill’s problem is a real or perceived conflict. That distinction is not supposed to matter to professional journalists, but I guess this case is an exception.

Well, there are a few questions here. First, do journalistic ethics matter here? Moderating a debate is something that is frequently done by journalists, but is it really journalism?

Judges are subject to an “appearance” standard because they make a lot of decisions that could be subjective (or that could reasonably go either way), and could make a big difference to the parties, and that are supposed to be neutral. Journalists — who make a lot of decisions about what to leave out and what to include, what sources to use, etc., and who are also supposed to be neutral — might arguably fall under a similar standard; the Society of Professional Journalists seems to think they do, though actual practice in the field seems to diverge rather considerably from that ideal . . . .

But a debate moderator isn’t actually an “arbiter,” as he or she doesn’t make any decisions. And while there’s room for unfairness, say in asking easier questions of one party or the other, everything happens in the open. So maybe an “appearance of impropriety” rule isn’t suitable here.

On the other hand, if, say, John Stossel or Bill O’Reilly were the moderator, I suspect that we’d be getting a lot of squawking from the same journalistic “watchdog” types who think there’s no problem with Gwen Ifill. And that double standard — and the departure from the neutrality ideal that it exemplifies — is a bigger problem than any conflict of interest on Ifill’s part. While a debate moderator isn’t practicing journalism while moderating a debate, those who report on these matters are a different kettle of fish, and it’s a kettle that’s starting to smell kinda bad . . . .

In The Appearance of Impropriety, we talk about two kind of ethics paradoxes, named for Master Blifil in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. “Petty Blifil” involves the use of trivial ethics charges as an offensive weapon, something we see a lot of. “Grand Blifil” involves the focus on ethical minutiae as a way of disguising the fact that the entire game is corrupt. I’d say the latter applies to journalism in 2008.

UPDATE: Reader Michael Grubbs emails:

Am I missing something? Democrats wouldn’t debate EACH OTHER on Fox News. It was simply beneath them to subject themselves to such partisan hacks. Furthermore, I don’t find it shocking that the Republicans will be called crybabies (it has happened at my work already). It is an amazing double standard that we must embrace; we have no other choice.

Oh, I think there are other choices. I’ll have a post on that later.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Michael Silence thinks I’m going too easy on her:

There’s some discussion about whether this is ethical. Seems to me if you have to ask the question, then you know the answer.

Back in my reporting days, had I been covering two candidates and writing a book on one of them, it’s quite possible I would have been fired. At the very least, I would have been removed from ANY contact with that race.

Sometimes I think the MSM checked its ethics at the turn of the century.

Naw. If they’d checked ’em, it’d mean they wanted ’em back someday . . . .

SOME INTERESTING COMMENTS on yesterday’s podcast about Adam Shepard’s Scratch Beginnings. I agree with the guy who says it ought to be required reading for 8th graders.

SOME THOUGHTS ON journalistic ethics.

A COLLECTION OF bizarre Green news.

THE FINANCIAL CRISIS: What went wrong? (Via TaxProf).

NICE TO KNOW, IN CASE WE NEED IT: Low Cost Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Removal Looks Possible.

Now if we can just do something about removing methane.

KING EDWARD’S EXTRAVAGANT EARMARK: Another episode of PorkBusters on Patrol.

READER RICHARD RILEY SAYS REPLACE PELOSI WITH RAHM EMANUEL:

Not only do I agree with the Washington Post, Katie Granju, and plenty of other fellow Obama supporters whom you’ve linked to that it’s time for Pelosi to go – the partisan point-scoring during the bailout vote was just the last straw – I also think it’s time to get a groundswell going for her replacement: Rahm Emanuel, not Hoyer or Clyburn. Emanuel is partisan in a good way, liberal enough for the House Dem caucus as a whole but as an old Clintonite acceptable to New Dems and Blue Dogs, and MUCH more politically savvy and, frankly, more humane than Pelosi. Even Republicans, if they are realistic about the fact that the House and Senate will remain Democratic, should start plumping for Rahm since a functional House of Representatives is in the country’s interest regardless of who becomes President.

Interesting idea.

UPDATE: Another reader — weirdly, also named Richard Riley — emails:

Would you please forward to the other Richard Riley my thanks for making me look good to my co-workers?

I agree with him, but would go farther than plumping for Emanuel. Republicans should unite behind Emanuel, and try to peel off 16 dissatisfied Democrats to vote with them. It wouldn’t matter if Pelosi held an overwhelming majority of the Democrats – if the GOP could grab 16, they could pick the next speaker. It would be a big step toward genuine bipartisanship – a speaker that owes his seat to both parties.

Plus, it would be great fun.

READER WILLIAM CASEY EMAILS: “Have you noticed that there has been nothing in the media about Joe Bidins’s family? Not that I’ve seen anyway.”

YEAH, that fraud suit involving his son and brother didn’t make much of a splash.

UPDATE: Speaking of double standards, Michael Silence observes:

Palin has been running for just over a month. Obama has been running for more than 18 months. So I did a search on Yahoo News;

Palin and experience: 13,538 results
Obama and experience: 15,074 results

I think that pretty much sums it up.

Yep.

WHAT IF THEY HAD A BANK RUN, but nobody showed up?

UPDATE: Related item from Jack Lail.