SAY IT AIN’T SO: Soy biodiesel worse for global warming. “Maybe politicos should do more research before imposing half-baked energy mandates.”

MICHAEL KINSLEY: Who Owns The First Amendment? Journalists Think They Do — And They’re Wrong. “An interview is a commercial transaction in which the reporter and the source each hope to gain something. Such exchanges rarely amount to anything illicit, but most FOIA requests, on all subjects, are dry holes. And many FOIA requests offend people’s sense of privacy or give succor to their enemies, rivals, or competitors. . . . For people whose job it is to describe the world, journalists often seem to have remarkable difficulty imagining life in other people’s shoes.”

QUINCY NEWS: Quincy May Be Tea Party Central Again This Week.

STEPHEN GREEN: The Week In Blogs: Paid Companions, Unpaid Debt, And The Government’s Magic Touch. Nice to see my The country’s in the very best of hands line is still around.

PROGRESS: Israeli researchers develop small, lightweight hydrogen storage tech.

TOM MAGUIRE: Politics Suspends Critical Thinking At The Times.

IN THE MAIL: From Steven Stark and Harrison Stark, World Cup 2010: The Indispensable Guide to Soccer and Geopolitics.

TIM CAVANAUGH: “Republicans are standing up for Goldman because they support laissez faire capitalism and unfettered free markets. Inconveniently for that thesis, Goldman has given more than twice as much money to Democrats as to Republicans in this election cycle.”

APRIL 25, 1980: Remembering the Desert One debacle.

I HAVEN’T TRIED THE Kodak Playsport pocket video camera, but it looks to be something like a waterproof version of the Zi8, which I own and which is pretty cool. I don’t see any sign of an external microphone input, though, and I’d guess that’s been dropped for easier waterproofing. Still for $149, including a free memory card, not bad. (The free HDMI cable, which my Zi8 came with, too, is a nice touch.) There are lots of good pocket video cameras out now in this price range. I want these things to be even more ubiquitous by the next round of Tea Party rallies and Congressional campaign events . . . .

RACISM AT BOSTON’S 98.5 FM? Somewhere, Don Imus is smiling.

SORRY, WE’RE STILL SCREWED: Reihan Salam says we’re heading into a decade-long economic buzz saw. “We are propping up the most rotten sectors of the economy and diverting talent that would otherwise shift into the new interrelated systems that are slowly emerging—and this emergence will prove very slow indeed once the inevitable tax burden required to prop up aging yet politically powerful sectors hits.” Let’s hope this is wrong, but it’s basically an explanation of why a powerful federal government, unconstrained by traditional limits, is a bad idea. Oh, well, at least I’ve got Vox Day’s book to cheer me up . . . .

SNICKERDOODLES, past and present.

FRANK ROSS: Re South Park, The Silence Of The Media Lambs Continues. “That’s right: an American-born Muslim convert with ties to a small extremist group operating openly in the United States of America can affect the programming policy of a cable comedy network whose headliners — Stone and Parker, and Jon Stewart — pride themselves on their fearless irreverence.”

Funny how all those talking-heads who solemnly warned us about the danger of violenct speech don’t have anything to say about, you know, actual threats. Maybe if we tell them he’s really a Tea Party mole . . . .

BILL DYER: Share your ideas for breaking the LA Times’ stonewall on the Obama/Khalidi Tape.

ANTHRAX UPDATE: I missed this the other day: Colleague Disputes Case Against Anthrax Suspect.

A former Army microbiologist who worked for years with Bruce E. Ivins, whom the F.B.I. has blamed for the anthrax letter attacks that killed five people in 2001, told a National Academy of Sciences panel on Thursday that he believed it was impossible that the deadly spores had been produced undetected in Dr. Ivins’s laboratory, as the F.B.I. asserts.

Asked by reporters after his testimony whether he believed that there was any chance that Dr. Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008, had carried out the attacks, the microbiologist, Henry S. Heine, replied, “Absolutely not.” At the Army’s biodefense laboratory in Maryland, where Dr. Ivins and Dr. Heine worked, he said, “among the senior scientists, no one believes it.”

Dr. Heine told the 16-member panel, which is reviewing the F.B.I.’s scientific work on the investigation, that producing the quantity of spores in the letters would have taken at least a year of intensive work using the equipment at the army lab. Such an effort would not have escaped colleagues’ notice, he added later, and lab technicians who worked closely with Dr. Ivins have told him they saw no such work.

I definitely get the impression that the feds have been more interested in pinning this on someone so they could close the case, than in actually getting to the bottom of things.

HMM: Roots of Islamic fundamentalism lie in Nazi propaganda for Arab world, book claims. “The roots of Islamic fanaticism can be traced to Adolf Hitler’s radio messages broadcast around the Arab world during the Second World War, according to a new book.”

JAMES TARANTO: A Real Peace Movement: “Antiwar” rallies are more violent than tea-party ones.

PRIZE-WINNING cookbooks.

PROF. JACOBSON: “The loss of relevance must be a frustrating thing. It can drive some people mad.”

UPDATE: More thoughts from Ed Driscoll.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The Paranoid Style of American Liberalism. “Liberals, to put it mildly, are not dealing well with their declining political fortunes. For some reason, liberals seem surprised that Americans have not warmed to the Obama administration’s policies, like government takeover of health care; bailouts and government ownership in multiple industries; wasteful and ineffective ‘stimulus’ spending; unheard of deficits; massive tax increases slated for next year; and a foreign policy that perversely alienates our allies and caters to our enemies. There has never been a time in our history when most Americans would have approved of such policies, yet liberals are somehow convinced that today’s manifestation of longstanding voter attitudes represents a unique and sinister animus against Barack Obama and his administration.”

HEH: That Was Quick… Forget the Dialogue & Civility- Angry Coffee Party Mob Wants Blood! Switch ’em to decaf.

THE QUOTE THAT ISN’T A QUOTE: This piece in The Isthmus, a Wisconsin alt-weekly, quotes me as follows:

I actually emailed Glenn Reynolds, another law prof blogger from Instapundit, about this issue, and he told me that he thought Althouse’s blog could qualify as “relevant” academic work.

This was the email I received:

On your site you write that you consider Instapundit to be within the realm of the “public service and education” component of being a law professor. Do you believe that Althouse’s site would similarly qualify?

I answered:

As for the second question — sure. Not all of her posts are about law, of course, but then that’s hardly a requirement.

I never actually used the word “relevant,” which is presented in quotes. This isn’t a big deal — and it’s certainly not the first time I’ve been misquoted — but it’s a bit odd, though it doesn’t misrepresent my meaning, really. Maybe there’s another email I’m not finding via Gmail search? Anyway, I do think blogging is part of “public service and education.” My Dean has said that blogging counts as scholarship, even encouraged me to use research assistants for the blog, but I’ve never done that — for whatever reason, I’ve always tended to keep the blog its own thing, largely distinct from my day job. (Not all blogging lawprofs do that, though; some even host their blogs on university servers.) But I think blogging is more like writing opeds or book reviews than scholarly publication, at least most of the time. Occasionally one of my blog posts will morph into a law review article — like Is Dick Cheney Unconstitutional? or Libel In The Blogosphere — but even when they do, it’s the scholarship that’s really the scholarly output, with the blog just serving as an idea-generator. But there’s not much question that blogging and scholarship overlap a lot more than people once thought.

As Orin Kerr notes, “I think we’re seeing a shift in how law professors and legal journal editors view blogs. The old lines have blurred. Blogs have become a significant part of the scholarly conversation.”

Meanwhile, some thoughts on scholarship and mixed blogging from Stephen Bainbridge.

UPDATE: Reader James Graber writes: “As a non-academic, my reaction is that those are scare quotes or emphasis quotes, not quote quotes, and you are making too big a deal of it. Just my two cents worth.” Hmm. Normally in journalism, things that are quoted are quotes. But possibly. And maybe The Isthmus doesn’t follow journalistic protocols that closely.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The author emails: “Thanks for the link Glenn! Sorry about the quote issue –– I could have sworn that was the word I had used. I would have been more vigilant in an actual article –– that was just a quick blog post response to Althouse’s response to my article.”

IS “RADICAL MUSLIM” THE NEW GOTH? “This is a much greater mockery of Islam than a drawing of Muhammad! Nice work, Chesser, you loser.”

JERRY POURNELLE: What do they teach them in school nowadays?

ROGER SIMON: Censorship of Islamic Terminology: A Call for a Congressional Inquiry.