FIGHTING OVER eggs in the potato salad. Personally, I like eggs in most everything salad-y.

Memo to Connecticut Democratic Senate hopeful Richard Blumenthal: Misrepresent your military service, lose 10 points in the polls to all of your potential GOP opponents. Scott Rasmussen has the the details on initial fall-out from one of 2010 campaign’s classic gaffes.

Maybe somebody should pull Commerce Secretary Gary Locke aside and carefully explain to him that the global warming scare is over and Shanghai is not going to be flooded. Then he’ll know WATTS up with global cooling.

I’m starting warm up to this Nick Clegg chap.

A “power revolution” in Britain will be promised by Nick Clegg today as he tries to put his personal stamp on the Government in his first major statement as Deputy Prime Minister.

The Liberal Democrat leader will hail his programme of political reform as the most ambitious and radical since the Great Reform Act of 1832. He has told aides that the coalition government has given him the opportunity to implement the changes that he came into politics to pursue.

I know what you’re thinking. I was thinking the same thing. That kind of soaring language usually precedes calls for a panoply of new government programs. But read on . . .

In a speech in London Mr Clegg will promise a “wholesale, big bang” rather than piecemeal approach, including:

* scrapping the identity card scheme and second generation biometric passports;

* removing limits on the rights to peaceful protest;

* a bonfire of unnecessary laws;

* a block on pointless new criminal offences;

* internet and email records not to be held without reason;

* closed-circuit television to be properly regulated;

* new controls over the DNA database, such as on the storage of innocent people’s DNA;

* axeing the ContactPoint children’s database;

* schools will not take children’s fingerprints without asking for parental consent;

* reviewing the libel laws to protect freedom of speech.

“A bonfire of unnecessary laws.” The very thought of it warms the cockles of my cold libertarian heart.

When left and right come together in American politics we tend to get the worst of both sides. So this is encouraging. It’s still early, but the new U.K. Tory/LibDem coalition appears ready to both cut government programs and spending and roll back the British police/Nanny state.

Michael Yon reports more chaos in Thailand, as new protests snarl traffic and kids are let out of school early.

WHAT WENT WRONG in the Christmas Day bombing?  The Senate Intelligence Committee report identifies fourteen “points of failure.”  Failure No. 2 is the decision not to put Abdulmutallab on the “no fly” list, which the intel committee attributes to “the language of the watchlisting standard, the manner in which it was being interpreted at the time, or both.”

Hang on.  The intel committee is saying that the Bush Administration had made it too hard to put people on the watchlist?  Was that the result of some previously unnoticed, late-breaking wave of Bush Administration squishiness on terrorism?  Not exactly.  What the intel committee doesn’t mention is a concerted 2008 campaign, led by the ACLU, that was intended to make the watchlisting standard more rigid, and did.  Here’s what I said in Skating on Stilts about the Christmas Day errors:

Imagine for a minute that you were a security official watching the ACLU press conference in 2008. You see that the organization got the number of names on the list wrong, trashed TSA for a problem they’d created themselves, and received fawning coverage for it. Do you really want to stick your head over the parapet and suggest a substantial expansion of lists that the ACLU says are already “out of control” and are victimizing tens of millions of Americans? Nope, in those circumstances, there wasn’t much chance that standards for getting on the lists would be eased, or that TSA would soon get operational access to the other 95 percent of the database.

In the end when all is said and done, the investigations of the incident will find errors in how the agencies handled the lists and the screening. But when they do, for once we should skip the football analogies.

The errors weren’t “fumbles” or “dropped balls.” Instead, the most apt analogy comes from tennis.

Because if ever there were a “forced error” in policy making, this is it.

And as in tennis, full credit should go to the privacy advocates that forced it.

Well, the unclassified report is out.  And it says pretty much what I expected, except that the authors, who fearlessly trashed the State Department, NCTC, NSA, the CIA, and the FBI, couldn’t muster the courage to  credit the privacy lobby for its dubious achievement.

DOES THIS MEAN IT’S OVER? Red Shirt leaders surrender in Thailand.

WHY ENRON COULDN’T TAKE MANHATTAN: Sucker-punching Broadway audiences with a vivid and utterly unnecessary 9/11 flashback scene in the midst of a play about a failed business? It’s  a sure-fire way to guarantee of negative word of mouth, Nicole Gelinas writes.

CLAIRE BERLINSKI RESPONDS TO RONALD RADOSH: For the complete rundown, here’s Berlinski’s original article; Radosh’s rebuttal, and Berlinski’s response.

It sort of reminds me of something that Dennis Prager once wrote, quoting a famous joke among Soviet dissidents:  “In the Soviet Union, the future is known; it’s the past which is always changing.” And in a way, that morphing is still ongoing, as the legacy of the now happily deceased nation continues to be debated amongst historians of the Cold War.

NO REPRIEVE FROM THE GOVERNOR: So how many leftwing cliches can NBC’s Law & Order pack into its last episode to make it a very, very special farewell?

GENERAL MOTORS: Fantasy versus Reality.

THE ASSAULT ON REASON: Al Gore keeps hope alive for the future leaders of tomorrow.

SILICON GRAFFITI: The News They Kept To Themselves:

NOAM CHOMSKY CALLS ISRAELI GOVERNMENT ‘STALINIST’ for refusing him entry. No word yet if, like Frank Rich before him, he meant that as a compliment or not.

RAND IN, SPECTER OUT, and a runoff for Blanche Lincoln. A dramatic night!

A LITTLE POLITICAL, VEHICULAR COMIC RELIEF on this primary night…

(Seen in Madison, Wisconsin, a couple days ago.)

“WOW, THAT WAS THE PIMPIEST PIMPING THAT WAS EVER PIMPED…” It was annoyingly obvious tonight who the “American Idol” judges want to win. Lee got the choir, the best song, the lavish praise. And poor Crystal was dragged down with all those man-lyrics: “Maybe I’m a man and maybe you’re the only woman who could ever help me….”

Could this be evidence of a brewing revolt among Justice Department career attorneys? One of them who was a key member of the group handling the Philadelphia New Black Panther voter intimidation case from the 2008 election has resigned, citing problems with the official handling of the case. The Examiner’s J.P. Freire has the resignation letter.

The numbers from Kentucky are in . . . and it’s a Randslide.

Generally speaking, it’s good to see the guy endorsed by the political bosses get his clock cleaned. More party favorites and incumbents need to lose more often. Though I have to say that as a libertarian, I actually liked the Trey Grayson campaign’s caricature of Rand Paul better than I liked Paul himself.

For more on Paul, check the profile my magazine ran of him in our May issue.

BUT THEY’RE GOOD GERMAN OFFICIALS.  Here’s a quick privacy quiz.  Imagine that data from your unsecured wireless router has been mistakenly collected by a Google Street View car as it trundles down your street.  The company admits that it shouldn’t have done that.  In order to cure the privacy violation, you want Google to:

(a) Destroy your data

(b) Turn all your data over to German government officials

You can learn everything you need to know about the European privacy bureaucracy from the answer to this question.

REVERSING AGE-RELATED MEMORY LOSS: “Fischer’s team flipped the acetyl genetic switch to the “on” position in the older mice and their learning and memory performance became similar to that of 3-month-old mice.”

Don’t tell me.  I know there was something that I wanted faster, please.  Give me a minute.  It’ll come to me…

POLL NUMBERS ON KAGAN: 39% for. 39% against. Why so bad?

“HOW CAN I DISTURB SOCIAL ORDER? What happens in my house is a private matter.” A criminal trial over “group licentiousness” in China.

AT AMAZON, bargain books.

DID APPLE REJECT A POLITICAL CANDIDATE’S APP BECAUSE IT “DEFAMED” HENRY WAXMAN?  Dear Steve Jobs:  If you’re ever making a presentation and see a really fit blonde woman running down the aisle with a hammer, get off the stage.  She’s definitely looking for you.