AMANDA CARPENTER is jealous.

HUCKABEE’S SECRET WEAPON: Bloggers in Iowa.

INSIDE THE SATELLITE-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: Ed Driscoll goes behind the scenes at XM Satellite Radio.

CINDY SHEEHAN gets booed.

BOB KRUMM ON HUCKABEE’S GAMBLE: If Huckabee does fall short in Iowa, it will be a tribute to the power of alternative media and blogs, because most of the bad news about his campaign hasn’t gotten much big-media play.

REBECCA AGUILAR UPDATE: Unfair Park notes the Marisa Trevino piece I linked the other day, and observes:

Marisa Trevino is a friend of Rebecca Aguilar’s; she’s very clear about that in her Scripps News-syndicated column about Aguilar’s continued absence from KDFW-Channel 4, from which Aguilar was indefinitely suspended in October following her polarizing parking-lot interview with James Walton. But regardless of the columnist’s relationship with Aguilar, her question is legit: Why, after the managing editor and cameraman involved with the controversial piece received only hand slaps, hasn’t the station lifted Aguilar’s suspension?

Blog-commenters aren’t buying Trevino’s “racism” claim, and rightly so. Had a middle-aged white guy treated an elderly Hispanic woman the way that Rebecca Aguilar treated her victim interviewee, Trevino would likely find the behavior objectionable. So is her defense of Aguilar racist?

That said, she didn’t run the piece on her own, and other people at the station thought it was worth airing. It’s hard to justify the disparity in treatment, though I suppose you’d argue that a news anchor or correspondent is a “brand” and Aguilar has seriously damaged hers.

FUEL CHOICE: Bob Zubrin’s Energy Victory plan gets a thumbs-up from Frank Gaffney. I thought I’d linked this review before, but I guess not.

The book seems to be playing well with Democrats, too.

TWO HUNDRED YEARS AGO, the importation of slaves was made illegal.

And on this day in 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation took effect.

UPDATE: History.

ECONOMICS: 2007 not such a bad year after all.

I just hope it’s not average, like in the old Soviet joke: “How is today?” “Average.” “Average?” “Yes — worse than yesterday, better than tomorrow, so: average.”

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: “Watching the debate over whether Huckabee’s withdrawn ‘attack’ ad is over the top, and other assorted Iowa psychodramas makes interesting contrast with the rest of the world’s electioneering outside the Great Satan. . . . Meanwhile, we are daily reminded that Pakistan’s 1998 detonation of a nuclear weapon remains the greatest foreign policy lapse of the last quarter-century.”

PATRICK RUFFINI PREDICTS a big McCain victory in New Hampshire.

Plus Rudy’s problem: “In recent conversations with New Hampshire Republicans, I’m struck by how fierce hostility to the Mayor is. The media put this down to problems with ‘social conservatives,’ but that underestimates the scale of the problem. Granite State libertarians and small-government types find his gun record unacceptable. Base-wise, that doesn’t leave a lot.”

OPEN SECRETS: and the connection between Mark Steyn and the tiger at the San Francisco zoo.

MARS UPDATE: “The impact probability for a collision of asteroid 2007 WD5 with Mars on January 30 has increased from 1.3% to 3.9%.” Still long odds, but getting shorter. If Earth were facing similar probabilities, it would be big news.

TOM SMITH: “There’s something very strange going on in the UK. It’s getting to the point where it’s not even funny anymore.”

A CLINTON HOWLER ON PAKISTAN:

Senator Hillary Clinton was praised in the wake of the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto for demonstrating her command of the players and the issues at stake in Pakistan, even as another candidate, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, was criticized for stumbling over details.

But in two confident television appearances, on CNN and ABC, Clinton made an elementary error about Pakistani politics: She described President Pervez Musharraf as a “candidate” who would be “on the ballot.”

In fact, Musharraf was re-elected to the presidency in October.

Ouch.

VIEWS ON THE ECONOMY: Irwin Stelzer looks at the disconnect between people’s views on the economy and its actual performance.

TEN THINGS that will change your future. (Via John Birmingham, who likes the Chumby).

IN THE MAIL: The Insta-Wife got a copy of Roberta Isleib’s murder mystery, Deadly Advice, a story about a clinical psychologist who writes an advice column on the side. Blogs are involved, too. Gee, why would Helen be interested in that? . . . .

IRAQPUNDIT on New Year’s in Baghdad. “Though it’s not there yet, our city is on its way back.” Plus, the WaPo reporters don’t know how to party.

REGRETS, MIGHT-HAVE-BEENS, and the loss of “possible selves:” I think this is an interesting subject. Even if all your choices turn out well, they’re still choices, and you only get to live one out of many possible lives; in doing so you necessarily extinguish many other possible lives. In fact, as long as the value of those possible lives is more than zero, it’s theoretically possible to be in a situation where you have so much potential that anything you do is in some sense a net loss. I actually wrote something about this in the Yale Law Report (warning, big PDF file) some years ago. There’s even a mathematical model of life satisfaction as a function of options not exercised. . . .

This may also explain why people tend to get happier past their mid-forties. By that point, most of the possible selves have been extinguished (or at least the range of possibilities has narrowed) and the opportunity costs of living go down. You don’t have to veer into Barry Schwartz territory to find this interesting. And I do. I’ve forgotten who said that “the tragedy of life is that not all values can be realized,” but it’s certainly true.

UPDATE: Reader Gil Roth sends these Hegelian thoughts.

A HAPPY 2008 for Brendan Loy!

FORECAST FOR 2008: A 100% chance of alarmism.

I don’t know if disaster will come by flood or drought, hurricane or blizzard, fire or ice. Nor do I have any idea how much the planet will warm this year or what that means for your local forecast. Long-term climate models cannot explain short-term weather.

But there’s bound to be some weird weather somewhere, and we will react like the sailors in the Book of Jonah. When a storm hit their ship, they didn’t ascribe it to a seasonal weather pattern. They quickly identified the cause (Jonah’s sinfulness) and agreed to an appropriate policy response (throw Jonah overboard).

Today’s interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels. . . . When the Arctic sea ice last year hit the lowest level ever recorded by satellites, it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole planet was warming. When the Antarctic sea ice last year reached the highest level ever recorded by satellites, it was pretty much ignored. A large part of Antarctica has been cooling recently, but most coverage of that continent has focused on one small part that has warmed.

This is why it’s fun to point to unusually cold weather — because it forces them to respond that weather isn’t the same as climate.

UPDATE: In that spirit: Record snowfall in New Hampshire. “Today’s snowstorm made this month the snowiest December in New Hampshire in more than a century.”

HMM: Overeating And Obesity Triggered By Lack Of One Gene.

NOT THE FRESHEST FLOWER IN THE BUNCH: Cindy Sheehan to march on Rose Bowl Parade.

HAPPY NEW YEAR! May 2008 be a good one.