GLENN GREENWALD IS STILL UNHAPPY:

It’s been quite disturbing to watch them turn on a dime — completely reverse everything they claimed to believe — the minute Obama issued his statement saying that he would support this bill. They actually have the audacity to say that this bill — a bill which Bush, Cheney and the entire GOP eagerly support, while virtually every civil libertarian vehemently opposes — will increase the civil liberties that Americans enjoy, as though Dick Cheney, Mike McConnell and “Kit” Bond decided that it was urgently important to pass a new bill to restrict presidential spying and enhance our civil liberties. How completely do you have to relinquish your critical faculties at Barack Obama’s altar in order to get yourself to think that way?

There is no such thing as being halfway in the tank for Obama, apparently. As James Taranto noted earlier: “The Keith Olbermanns of the media world outnumber the Glenn Greenwalds, so when an Obama administration curtails civil liberties (justifiably or not), the outcry will be far more muted than it is now. If civil liberties are your top concern, then, you better vote for John McCain.”

When Obama wants to put a surveillance camera in everyone’s house, Olbermann will praise it as an aid to self-expression.

ROGER SIMON: Beyond Parody: Gore and Friedkin at La Scala.

IF PEOPLE WERE DOING THIS TO LEFTIES IT WOULD BE FASCIST MCCARTHYISM: Animal Rights Terrorism continues.

UPDATE: Brian Gates emails: “I think you mean to say that if the people doing this were not themselves lefties it would be McCarthyist fascism. There’s no reason to believe the victims aren’t lefties too.” Er, yes, that’s what I meant. Sorry about the confusion.

THE BELMONT CLUB explains what Russia doesn’t like about missile defense for the West.

MOHAMMED FADHIL: Why Iraq is Changing Its Tune on Withdrawal. I think it just underscores my point that if they ask us to leave, we should.

BRENDAN LOY: Are we in for a busy hurricane season? I don’t want anyone to get hurt, but in a way I kind of hope so. The southeastern United States depends on hurricane remnants for a good chunk of its summer rainfall, and we haven’t had much of that the last couple of years.

A GALLERY OF early 1970s car ads.

AUSTIN BAY on where we stand in Iraq.

DALE AMON: “I thought our readers might wish to celebrate the end of a very long and arduous road that Carla Howell and her friends have trod. I have heard they have just passed the last hurdle and their initiative to end the income tax in Massachusetts will appear on the ballot this fall.”

Here’s the campaign website. I certainly hope they succeed.

UH OH: Obama Echoes the Phrase That Made Me Turn Against Kerry.

IN THE MAIL: Steve Solomon’s Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times. We’ve certainly beaten the tomato shortage thanks to the Insta-Wife’s efforts.

JAMES LILEKS: “Somehow a sim about saving relief workers by blowing up terrorists is BAD, but a game in which one plays a criminal who drives around town running over pedestrians is okay. I’d say boys are getting mixed messages, but they’re probably not listening to the boycotters on either side.”

STUART BENJAMIN AND MITU GILATI on Presidential candidates naming their Supreme Court choices.

PROBABLY OUTSIDE OF TEXAS, TOO: Texans’ demand for concealed handgun licenses rises.

S.F. CITIZEN: Three Cheers to Southwest Airlines, Where They Don’t Have Fees for Everything. And, weirdly, they seem to be making money. Go figure.

Of course, even Southwest won’t be able to hold onto its customers if the DHS mandates shock bracelets for all air travelers. Jeez, I warned them about this stuff years ago, but they just don’t listen.

I CERTAINLY HOPE SO: “Sex in space is inevitable.”

BARACK OBAMA: Europeans are cooler than Americans.

Tom Maguire has some language questions for Obama, too. But isn’t contrasting American rubes with sophisticated Europeans more in the line of Democratic primary fodder than of general election material? And isn’t the whole French thing kind of, well . . . Kerryesque?

UPDATE: Reader Daniel Schensul emails:

Criticizing Obama for suggesting that kids should learn more foreign languages — Good times!!

Seriously, do you really want to mock someone for suggesting that it would be good for kids in schools to have better foreign language programs? Is that where you want your blog to go? You could have criticized him for avoiding the question of immigrants learning English, like they did over at the corner. Instead, you just typed the boilerplate attack line and move on.

That’s kinda sad, I have to say, and not normally your style.

I’m not mocking Obama for suggesting foreign language education. I’m mocking Obama for yuppie condescension. Watch the video.

EUGENE VOLOKH PROPERLY CRITICIZES A SLOPPY OPINION BY DISTRICT JUDGE GOMEZ in the Virgin Islands — it’s a post-Heller Second Amendment opinion in which Judge Gomez applies — clearly outdated — pre-Heller caselaw:

It may well be that the defendant didn’t provide enough argument to support his motion to dismiss. I’m also pretty sure that the courts will find that the right to keep and bear arms isn’t substantially burdened by the ban on knowingly possessing a firearm with an obliterated serial number; and they may well uphold the Virgin Islands license requirement, or conclude that only someone who has tried to get a licensed but been denied one is entitled to challenge the requirement.

But the court’s reliance on precedent strikes me as quite weak: Rybar was decided by the Third Circuit on the theory that the Second Amendment only protects gun possession when it has a “connection with militia-related activity.” Heller rejects that theory, which means that Rybar and Willaman are no longer good law. . . .

So I don’t think the district court was entitled to punt the matter to the pre-Heller collective-rights precedent. It needed to do the Heller analysis (or, if appropriate, decline to deal with the Second Amendment question, if the litigant hadn’t adequately argued it). And simply saying that under Heller the “right is not unfettered” isn’t an adequate justification for the court’s decision, either: Obviously some fetters are permissible but others aren’t, so the question is why these particular gun controls are justified given the Heller reasoning.

This, alas, is an example of the “desk-clearing mentality” among many federal judges that Judge Gilbert Merritt decried years ago in a Yale Law Journal piece on the bureaucratization of the federal judiciary. I’m afraid we’re likely to see a lot of it in the post-Heller world, especially given the lower federal courts’ demonstrated hostility to the notion of an individual right to arms. But note that the “collective right” approach, which the pre-Heller lower court caselaw followed, was rejected by all nine Supreme Court Justices. You’d think that would have made some impression on the District Courts. . . .

Meanwhile, Doug Berman comments: “I expect that we will be seeing lots and lots of plausible post-Heller Second Amendment claims brought . . . and lots and lots of (less plausible?) rejections of these claims by lower courts.” Yet if lower courts don’t conscientiously follow Supreme Court precedent, where does their legitimacy come from?

A ROUNDUP OF NEWS FROM IRAQ at The Mudville Gazette. I predict that once Obama completes his pivot, you’ll be hearing more about this stuff from the Big Media folks.

NONPROFIT MALFEASANCE:

Two prominent national nonprofit groups are reeling from public disclosures that large sums of money were misappropriated in unrelated incidents by an employee and a former employee.

The groups, Acorn, one of the country’s largest community organizing groups, and the Points of Light Institute, which works to encourage civic activism and volunteering, have dealt with the problems in very different ways.

Acorn chose to treat the embezzlement of nearly $1 million eight years ago as an internal matter and did not even notify its board. After Points of Light noticed financial irregularities in early June, it took less than a month for management to alert federal prosecutors, although group officials say they have no clear idea yet what the financial impact may be.

Acorn’s behavior doesn’t surprise me — they seem a bit shifty in general — but the entire nonprofit sector is suffering from deeply inadequate scrutiny despite being awash in money. The spin from Acorn’s President doesn’t suggest that they’ve learned any useful lessons.

UPDATE: Reader John Richardson emails:

What I found most interesting is that the article made no mention of the numerous ties that Sen. Obama has and has had to ACORN which I agree is a shifty, and I would go further and say sleazy, organization. A simple Google search using “ACORN” and “Obama” pulls up 516,000 hits.

Imagine if it was the relief organization CARE and someone had embezzled from them. The reporter from the NY Times would have found someway to mention that Cynthia Hensley McCain aka Cindy McCain was a board member and not doing her job of oversight.

No doubt.

OBAMA’S MECHANICAL TROUBLE: More dangerous than generally reported. If his plane had crashed, conspiracy theorists would have had a field day. “The emergency slide deployed in flight? Ridiculous! That’s never happened on any other plane! What kind of fools do they take us for?”

AT THE BBC, CRIME PAYS. “And quite handsomely, too.”

MICKEY KAUS: “Politico gravy-train Fannie Mae in trouble despite its massive implicit government subsidy, because new accounting rules would apparently require it to list billions of dollars of now off-the-balance-sheet mortgage guarantees as liabilities. Of course, the agency formerly headed by Obama’s ex-veep-vetter will probably wriggle out of the new rule thanks, as always, to political pressure.”

Kaus has more info on Fannie Mae’s problems, including a link to this post.

MY EARLIER PHOTO of the Tomato Head produced this email:

I was so glad to see the picture of The Tomato Head Restaurant . My childhood friend, Mahasti Vafaiw, owns the place. She has a true American success story.

We used to go to school in Iran and I actually moved to America because she moved here first. If you see her, tell her Frieda said hello!!!!!

Okay. And reader Daniel Aronstein writes “Why not give ’em a link?” Okay.