MICHAEL SILENCE NOTES the slow drip of Obama endorsements.

MCCAIN TRAVELS ABROAD, and James Kirchick is surprised at the good press.

STILL MORE ON THE Clinton-Obama racial divide.

VOTING MACHINES, SECURITY, AND MORE: A video interview with Princeton security expert Ed Felten.

VIDEO: The wonderful, horrible life of Philip Johnson.

REMEMBERING THE 1983 PONTIAC TRANS AM: I actually preferred the prior, Smokey and the Bandit incarnation, which had a certain barbaric splendor that the later models lacked.

OBAMA: “I won’t be smiling.”

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Citizens Against Government Waste has released the 2008 Congressional Pig Book, and it’s full of juicy, greasy, goodness. Here’s a summary:

Some of the biggest pork projects, according to the group, include a Lobster Institute; the Rocky Flats, Colorado, Cold War Museum; and the First Tee, a program to build young people’s character through golf.

Members of Congress requested funds for all these pet projects and thousands of others last year, according to the latest copy of the annual “Pig Book” released by Citizens Against Government Waste.

“Congress stuffed 11,610 projects” worth $17.2 billion into a dozen spending bills, the group said in the report released Wednesday.

The “Pig Book” names dozens of what the citizens group considers the most egregious porkers, the lawmakers who funnel money to projects on their home turf.

Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, the top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, requested the most money, $892.2 million, according to the group. . . .

“There were several candidates for the Narcissist Award,” Tom Schatz, the president of the group said.

“But this one went to House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel for the Charles Rangel Public Service Center at the City College of New York — $1,950,000 (to a project) that he named after himself.”

Rangel, a Democrat from New York, said last summer he was “honored that City College chose to have my name attached to what is an important project, not just for the residents of my congressional district, but for New York City and this nation.”

A call to Rangel’s office wasn’t immediately returned.

Both parties came in for criticism, with the Democrats who control both houses of Congress topping the Republicans in spending.

Read the whole thing(s) — and ask your Senators and Representative if they’ll take the Earmark Moratorium pledge.

MORE NEWS FROM ZIMBABWE: “Zimbabwe’s official election commission has confirmed that the Zimbabwe Africa National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF), the party which has ruled the country for nearly 30 years, has lost its parliamentary majority, news agencies report.”

UPDATE: More on Zimbabwe developments in this roundup.

IS HILLARY toughening up Obama?

WHAT IS IT WITH ALL THE HOOKERS IN AMERICAN POLITICS lately? At least Bill Clinton was getting it for free.

UPDATE: Gateway Pundit has a roundup, for those who are interested.

IN SALON, ELIZABETH SVOBODA WRITES ON GEOENGINEERING FOR GLOBAL WARMING:

Gregory Benford thinks Al Gore’s a good guy and all, but he also thinks the star of “An Inconvenient Truth” is a little delusional. Driving a hybrid car, switching your bulbs to compact fluorescents and springing for recycled paper products are all well-meaning strategies in the fight against global warming. But as UC-Irvine physicist Benford sees it, there’s a catch. Those do-gooder actions are not going to be effective enough to turn the temperature tide, and even incremental political changes like reducing greenhouse gas emissions and mining alternative fuel sources are not forward-thinking enough. “I never believed we were going to be able to thwart global warming through carbon restriction,” Benford says. “Carbon restriction requires nations to subvert short- and midterm goals for a long-term goal they’ve read about online, and that’s just not going to work.”

As an alternative, Benford has cooked up a plan that amounts to a manmade Mount Pinatubo eruption. He has proposed shooting trillions of tiny particles of earth into the stratosphere, where they will remain suspended to help blot out incoming solar rays. Dirt is cheap, chemically unreactive and easily crushable, he argues, making it a simple matter to test this strategy on a small scale over the Arctic before total global deployment.

I think it’s important to research this stuff, but I’d be very slow to move to “total global deployment,” especially given that recent years seem to have been cooler. On the other hand, this passage captures the more, er, religious tone of many objections:

Questions of usefulness and necessity aside, grand-scale sun-blocking schemes feel dubious in part because they challenge our intuitive sense that large-scale wrongs can be atoned for only with equally large-scale sacrifices. Drastic emissions cutbacks require drastic lifestyle changes, like taking shorter showers and scrapping the Hummer. Such changes feel right because they’re a little painful; putting the squeeze on ourselves is suitable penance for the collective sin of spewing tailpipe fumes into the atmosphere for the past 100-plus years.

Geoengineering, by contrast, seems like an undeserved dispensation.

Sin, penance, and dispensation — the key elements of a scientifically-based climate policy!

PROFESSOR: If you text in class, I will leave.

MICHAEL YON ON CATCHING TERRORISTS by making clever use of brothels.

IN THE MAIL: Implied Spaces, by Walter Jon Williams. I met him in New Mexico some years ago; he seemed like a nice guy.

IF YOU KILL PEOPLE, your religion won’t be mocked. This is a poor message to send.

ROGER KIMBALL: Rudyard Kipling, Unburdened.

PIZZA HUT IS COMING UNDER FIRE for suspending a driver who defended himself against a robbery attempt:

A Des Moines pizza driver who was suspended from his job after he shot an armed robber said today he has been overwhelmed by support from people who cheered what happened.

“But no one had contacted me directly about a job offer,” said James William Spiers III, 38, who was sent home by Pizza Hut managers after he fired multiple shots at a man who put a gun to his head Thursday and demanded money outside the Sutton Hill Apartments, 2100 S.E. King Ave. . . .

Spiers, who has a valid handgun permit, said he’s been “pretty much in the dark” about his job since the incident. Vonnie Walbert, vice president of human resources at Pizza Hut’s corporate offices in Dallas, said last week that employees are not allowed to carry guns “because we believe that that is the safest for everybody.”

Uh huh. Good thing he didn’t listen or he might be being carried by six instead of subjected to mealy-mouthed HR flackery from one.

UPDATE: Kevin, I’m not “outraged,” I just think it’s, well, kinda mealy-mouthed on their part, especially in light of what actually, you know, happened.

TURNING NUCLEAR WASTE INTO ELECTRICITY with nanotechnology? I’d certainly like to see it work.

BOINGBOING TV: Videoblogging in Tunisia.

JOHN SCALZI on achieving the perfect level of fame.

F.I.R.E. TAKES ON COLORADO COLLEGE CENSORSHIP. Here’s more from Inside Higher Ed.:

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is criticizing Colorado College for punishing students who distributed a flyer that mocked a flyer distributed by feminist students on the campus. The feminist students’ flyer is called “The Monthly Rag” and the leaflet mocking it is called “The Monthly Bag.” When the latter appeared, with its authors identified only as “the coalition of some dudes,” college officials asked those responsible to come forward. When they did, FIRE asserted, they were ordered to hold a campus forum after being found guilty of violating the student code against violence. FIRE called this inconsistent and unfair. Greg Lukianoff said in a statement: “One flyer that mentions ‘male castration’ is not violence, but a flyer that makes fun of it by mentioning ‘chainsaws’ is prohibited? Both should be protected, but the double standard and lack of respect for freedom of speech in this case is simply staggering.”

Read the whole thing.

NABBED: “A Jamaican man behavior specialists spotted acting suspiciously was detained and arrested after components used to make pipe bombs, unknown liquids and bomb-making literature were found in his luggage at Orlando International Airport.”

A LOOK AT AUTOMATED EXTERNAL DEFIBRILLATORS in public places. They really should be ubiquitous, and I’m actually kind of disappointed that my gym doesn’t have one. I even thought about buying one of these for home, but since the Insta-Wife has one built-in it didn’t seem like a good deal. Meanwhile, note that they’re now recommending hands-only CPR for situations when AEDs aren’t available. But AEDs are much better than CPR.

UPDATE: Or maybe not. Here’s a study saying that home defibrillators don’t help: “The study, which included more than 7,000 patients at risk of having the seizures because of previous heart attacks, found that patients in homes equipped with the gear died at the same rate as those without it.” On the other hand, part of this may be because so few people need ’em to begin with: “Four of 14 patients whom the HeartStart deemed in need of a shock, and who then were given it, survived, according to the researchers. But the numbers were too small to be statistically significant.” And here’s why built-in is better: “More than half of the incidents occurred when no one was around to witness them, suggesting a possible market for better alert systems.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: On the other hand, Ed Cone writes: “Thanks for the post on AEDs – one saved the life of my daughter’s classmate last month.” He sends this news report:

Chris is a 14-year-old eighth-grader at Greensboro Day School with no history of medical problems. On March 3 , he was playing Battle Ball , a form of dodgeball, in the school gym. As he stepped behind some rolled-up wrestling mats, he collapsed against the wall and slid to the floor.

His heart had gone into an irregular rhythm — one that couldn’t keep him alive. He had no pulse. He wasn’t breathing. . . .

One of the AEDs was in a coaches’ office just off the gym where Chris lay. The school’s nurse, Linda Sudnik; its director of sports medicine, Jon Schner; and assistant trainer Mike Gale were moments away.

After students alerted them, Sudnik and Schner arrived and began rescue breathing and chest compressions. When Gale brought the device to the gym, they used it to shock Chris’s heart. The shock didn’t return Chris’s heartbeat to normal, Schner said, but it did create a better rhythm, one that could sustain life.

By the time an ambulance arrived, Chris had a pulse and was breathing on his own again.

And here’s a blog report on the story, too.

MORE PROBLEMS FOR HILLARY as a story about a firing comes out.