OBAMA’S race against race.

EXTREME MORTMAN says that Pennsylvanians should ask Obama and Hillary about the Heller case and the Second Amendment. “A simple question: Which way do you hope the case is decided?”

SIGH. IT NEVER ENDS: More NY Gov. sex scandals. No wonder Spitzer thought he was just engaging in business as usual . . . .

ITUNES MOVIE RENTALS dubbed “not ready for primetime.”

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Porkers of the Month:

Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) named all 71 senators who voted against a one-year earmark moratorium March Porkers of the Month. The amendment to the fiscal year 2009 Budget Resolution was offered by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and had fourteen bipartisan co-sponsors including the support of all three presidential candidates.

“King of Pork” Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W. Va.) dismissed the earmark ban saying, “The idea that an all-knowing, all-powerful executive bureaucracy is more trustworthy than the elected representatives of the people when it comes to spending taxpayer dollars challenges the most basic tenet of our political system.”

In a similar vein, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) opposed the ban as “unrealistic” and even went so far as to erroneously claim that earmarking “has been going in this country for 230-some-odd years,” and that “The Founding Fathers would be cringing to hear people talking about eliminating earmarks.”

There is a proper system for projects to be vetted by agencies (the “all-knowing, all-powerful” bureaucrats) that’s fallen by the wayside. Congress did not earmark extensively until the 1980s. Instead, Congress would fund general grant programs and let federal and state agencies select individual recipients through a competitive process or formula. The House and Senate Appropriations Committees named specific projects only when they had been vetted and approved by authorizing committees. Members of Congress with local concerns would lobby the president and federal agencies for consideration. The process was aimed at preventing abuse and allocating resources on the basis of merit and need.

Today, Appropriations Committee members arbitrarily pick winners and losers by earmarking funds for specific recipients.

It’s not only wasteful, but it contributes — significantly — to corruption.

IN PENNSYLVANIA, Clinton leads Obama by 26 points.

MICKEY KAUS on the Obama speech.

UPDATE: Sympathy for Grandma.

A REASON TO SUPPORT OBAMA: Super Delegate Jack Murtha endorses Hillary Clinton.

CALLS MOUNT FOR BEIJING OLYMPIC BOYCOTT.

SO I’M AT THE BEACH, but it’s kind of a working trip. Among other things, I spent a couple of hours having my picture made for a news article on blogging, emphasizing that bloggers can, and do, blog anywhere. Though I actually did manage a couple of midday posts while this was going on, it had the predictable effect of causing me to do less blogging than usual. Luckily, I had scheduled a few items so that things weren’t completely dead. Meanwhile Helen got to serve as “grip,” helping the photographer with lighting, etc. And yes, that’s a Reason shirt I’m wearing.

ARTHUR C. CLARKE HAS DIED. I first spoke with him back in 1988. I sent a copy of my first book to him in Sri Lanka, and got a phone call from him the next day — from Baltimore, where he was at Johns Hopkins and thought to be suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease. He wrote me a while later to give me the good news that it was just the post-polio syndrome. It seems that it finally got him, but at the ripe age of 90. He was a very thoughtful guy, and a very good correspondent; he even autographed a copy of 2001 for my daughter when, at age 2, she could name all the moons of Jupiter. I doubt that I would do as well, if I attained his degree of fame. I nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize, but Yasser Arafat got it instead. I think it’s pretty clear that Clarke would have been a better choice . . . .

The world is better for his having lived, and worse for his having died.

UPDATE: Bruce Webster on Clarke’s influence: “He was the last of the Big Three — Isaac Asimov, Clarke, and Robert Heinlein — to pass away, and we shall not see their like again. It is hard to overstate the impact that these three authors had upon not just one, but at least two or three generations of scientist and engineers in the Anglosphere, particularly those of us who grew up in the 1950s through the 1970s.”

QUEENFISH: A Cold War Tale. “After Dr. McLaren’s mission, the Arctic became a theater of military operations in which the Soviets tried to hide their missile-carrying subs under the fringes of the ice pack while American attack subs tried relentlessly to track them. The goal was to destroy the Soviet subs if the cold war turned hot, doing so quickly enough to keep them from launching their missiles and nuclear warheads at the United States.”

The story’s about Alfred McLaren’s new book, Unknown Waters: A First-Hand Account of the Historic Under-ice Survey of the Siberian Continental Shelf by USS Queenfish (SSN-651). The book sounds interesting enough that I’ve ordered a copy.

GEORGE CLOONEY’S SELECTIVE ACTIVISM: “George Clooney is Hollywood’s ‘heartthrob with a conscience’ — except when it interferes with lucrative endorsement deals.” Hollywood activism is about stars feeling good about themselves. But nothing makes stars feel as good about themselves as money, so . . .

TENURE: THE MOVIE.

OBAMA’S SPEECH: I don’t have much to say that hasn’t already been said, and I was too busy to do more than glance over the text, which is no substitute for seeing it delivered. But it seems to have been a good speech. The question is, how much does that help a guy who’s known for giving good speeches, when the real question is whether he means what he says?

Roger Simon, meanwhile, was moved to poetry.

UPDATE: A Rand Simberg roundup.

LOS ANGELES TIMES: U.S. Supreme Court seems poised to strike down D.C. handgun ban. I certainly hope so, though GOP partisans might prefer that it went the other way, since that would make a McCain presidency much more likely.

UPDATE: More here. Predicting votes based on oral arguments is iffy, but there seems to be a lot of agreement that there are at least 5 votes here. I hope that’s right.

MORE: Ilya Somin: “Unlike some of my co-conspirators I don’t have the expertise to opine on the question of how far a constitutional right to bear arms should extend. However, experience in other areas of constitutional law suggests that any victory for individual rights will be a hollow one if the Court defers to the government in determining how broad the right should be.”

SHOWING OFF A CRASH-TESTED FORD TAURUS.

REVIEWING THE REVIEWERS: A roundup of this weekend’s book reviews from all over.

JOURNALISM: “New and troubling questions.”