MADE IT BACK FROM D.C. Our departure was a bit later than we had planned, as we were rousted out of bed by the fire alarms in the middle of the night, which led to the hotel being evacuated, and us standing outside for quite a while before they let us back in. (There was a real fire, but sprinklers extinguished it almost immediately, we were told) Unlike many people, I was dressed (“Keep clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark” — Robert Heinlein) but it was the InstaWife who was fastest off the mark in getting everyone up and out. Despite being on the 5th floor, we were among the very first people out of the building. She’s pretty good in an emergency.

Driving home, she took my place at the wheel for a couple of hours, and I sat in the backseat with our daughter, watching Agent Cody Banks on the in-car video. A spy thriller with nanobots! Not bad, actually. And heroine Hillary Duff is no shrinking violet, arranging for the bad guy to get eaten alive from the inside out by weaponized nano-disassemblers. She doesn’t seem at all sad about his gruesome end, either. More Bellicose Women stuff, I guess. I think that a Teen Heroine from years past would have exhibited more signs of reluctance or remorse after gruesomely offing the bad guy.

Watched some Rocky and Bullwinkle, too. And it was an interesting experience sitting in the back seat of the Passat. I’ve owned it for over four years and I’m sure that the time I spent sitting back there today exceeded the accrued time up to that point. It was roomy and comfy. And what I wouldn’t have given to be able to watch movies and cartoons in the backseat when I was a kid. . . .

Tired now. Back later.

FINISHED THE INTERVIEWS, and later had dinner with a bunch of law-professor types, including Tyler Cowen and David Bernstein of The Volokh Conspiracy and Larry Solum of Legal Theory Blog.

Go read this Matt Welch article on Sabine Herold from The National Post. I may or may not blog later — the “STSN High-Speed Internet Access” in the hotel should be called “Intermittent Internet Access” since it seems to lose sync for about five seconds out of every ten, making blog posting very irritating and problematic.

And don’t miss Carolyn McCarthy’s Iraq Blog:

Ever since we landed in Baghdad yesterday, I’ve been amazed at the morale of our troops. I talked to one soldier who said even though we haven’t found the weapons of mass destruction, he’s convinced that we are in Iraq for the right reasons. He felt that the conditions that the people of Iraq were facing under Hussein were so bad, that even being here just to help them free their country was reason enough. I’ve got a lot of reservations about the run up to the war in Iraq. Poor intelligence, lack of a coherent message from the Administration and a faulty plan for winning the peace are all problems, but seeing our work with my own eyes has been helpful. We’re doing a lot of good over here.

Hmm. Another Democratic member of Congress taking a more positive view of what’s going on in Iraq than the Big Media. . . .

And there’s more bad news for Gerhard Schroeder. Good.

UPDATE: Jeez, Tyler Cowen has already blogged our dinner. That’s the blogosphere!

And Anna has pictures from the D.C. antiwar protests. The InstaWife saw them, and pronounced them lame. The protests, that is, not the pictures.

AMERICA 100, TALIBAN 0: This says it all!

UPDATE: Weirdly, this post got me a lot of critical email along these lines:

Are you sure it is not TALIBAN 0, AMERICA 100? This picture, perhaps more than anything else, will confirm the corruptive influence of American culture to the Islamic world. I can understand at least a passing appreciation of what this picture might represent — a rejection of the gnostic fundamentalist view (both Christian and Muslim) of the human body. When I see the black shrouded women of the Middle East who look like “Cousin It” of the Adaams family, I feel pity for them and a resolute conviction that the Taliban and the “culture” that they represent must be opposed. But I must also ask, Mr. Reynolds, is this (the woman is the red bikini) all that the United States of America has to offer the world? Is this picture what America is all about?

I have greatly enjoyed your blog and read it daily, but at times such entries are rather telling. I am neither a fundamentalist Christian or Muslim, but sometimes your lack of any semblance of discernment about anything other than pragmatic economics or foreign policy is appalling. Mr. Reynolds, is there anything other than a particular brand of conservative politics that informs your world view? What is it that informs your understanding of what it good, true, and beautiful? Are goodness, truth, and beauty even a part of your world view? From whence comes your sense of ethics or morality? Have you ever asked yourself these questions?

Please do not consider this E-mail a condemnation or pompous, puritanical rant. I thoroughly enjoyed viewing that woman, but this is the problem: Should we, as married men who have vowed to love our wives, indulge ourselves in this way?

Last question first: the InstaWife’s comment was “wow, she’s hot!” ‘Nuff said.

As for the rest, I’m not a “conservative.” I’m strongly pro-bikini. I don’t believe in “traditional family values” as a political platform. I’m more in the Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy! category. If that bothers, you, too bad. There are plenty of other blogs out there.

OKAY, I’m still waiting for the guys to deliver the chairs to the interview suite — where we need ’em at 8:30 tomorrow morning — but I’m just too beat to blog anymore. See you later.

GREGG EASTERBROOK’S TMQ COLUMN IS GONE, but there’s a TMQ homage contest underway.

NOT MANY PEOPLE REALIZE that Knoxville is home to a winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics. Oddly enough!

DI ANOTHER DAY: Brendan O’Neill has a creditable piece on conspiracy theories, but I think he wrote the whole thing just to have an excuse for the title.

MY MISTAKE: Atrios takes me to task for identifying Jimmy Carter with the 55 mile per hour speed limit in this week’s TCS column. Originally, I did so very specifically because I remembered so many people complaining about it and blaming Jimmy.

Trouble is, they were wrong, and so was I. (Yeah, I could have found the right answer via Google, but you have to think to look at Google, and I thought I knew.) A couple of readers emailed me and pointed out the error, and I fixed it, though not to Atrios’ satisfaction. The point of the column, however (at least to me), wasn’t really Jimmy Carter. But I’ll post a clearer correction at TCS, just to make it plain. I don’t promise not to make mistakes — and anyone who does is, ahem, overoptimistic — just to fix ’em when I do.

As for Atrios’ comments on the Reagan drinking-age increase spearheaded by Liddy Dole, it was a lousy and hypocritical move, the sort of thing I’ve called fair-weather federalism.

UPDATE: As proof, of, well, something, a reader immediately emailed me to say that I shouldn’t be accusing Atrios of fair-weather federalism. Unless he’s secretly Liddy Dole (not the first on my list of his potential secret identities, but hey, who knows?) I wasn’t.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The beauty of blogs. The TCS folks noticed this post and put up their own correction, which is more generous to me, and less generous to them, than is really warranted, or than I would have written myself. They didn’t catch the mistake, it’s true, but I’m the one who made it. I must say, though, that the manufactured outrage over this issue from the lefty bloggers is rather amusing. It’s as if I’d accused Carter of ordering thermostat settings across the country or something. Oh, wait. . . .

And reader Geoff Campbell notes that the national speed limit, which was originally intended as a temporary measure, was reenacted in 1978 with more teeth — which probably explains why I remember people bitching about Carter in connection with speed limits. And reader Robert Ellison notes:

You say you’ll clarify the issues regarding Jimmy Carter’s support of the 55-mph speed limit at TCS. I hope that when you do, you also make it clear that Carter was a very strong supporter of the limit, and that it was he more than anyone else who switched the standard justification for the limit from “55 saves fuel” (which is why the limit was originally imposed) to “55 saves lives” (which was a minor argument at the time of the imposition).

So Carter strongly supported a stupid law that didn’t achieve its original goal (saving fuel), and then he put up a new, more stupid reason for the law, thus undermining its legitimacy. When we repealed the limit, both the original and new reasons were proven false.

Carter wasn’t malevolent here, but as usual, he was an idiot. THAT is why we tend to associate him with the 55-mph limit. 55 wastes time!

This seems to be true, judging by this State of the Union message:

In the area of accidental injury control, we have established automobile safety standards and increased enforcement activities with respect to the 55 MPH speed limit. By the end of the decade these actions are expected to save over 13,000 lives and 100,000 serious injuries each year.

I urge the new Congress to continue strong support for all these activities.

At the very least, Carter certainly didn’t mind being associated with the speed limit. I suppose it’s progress toward suspicion of the Nanny State that even lefties now view such an association as a vicious calumny. Nonetheless, I regret the initial error.

MORE: I don’t think I can tie it to blogs and CB radio, but Andrew Lloyd points out Jimmy Carter’s best moment as President. I agree.

SORRY THE BLOGGING’S BEEN SO LIGHT — I’ve been travelling all day and I’m beat. I’ll try to deliver some free ice cream tomorrow, but no promises on when or how much.

Email will be iffy, too.

THE CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS is a new lefty think tank (though this Post story’s headline makes it seem as if it’s the first such, which it isn’t). And they’ve got Eric Alterman writing for them — and with the best picture of him I’ve seen so far. Give me that photographer’s number. . . .

BILL HOBBS WONDERS why Chief Wiggles’ Iraqi toy drive isn’t getting more attention.

I don’t like criticizing people for what they’re not blogging about, as a general matter, but I hope that more people will think about it, and decide to help. If not, well, the blogosphere is a big place, and we don’t all have to be blogging about the same stuff, after all.

ANOTHER QUAGMIRE IS PRODUCING PROTESTS:

“I mean like all the soldiers and Iraqis dying in the Middle East is bad enough,” stated Progressive Union secretary Kavita Pavel. “But has the Republican administration given one thought to how dangerous it is to live in Mississippi? Over 28,000 people died there in 2002, like way more Americans than have been killed in Iraq. Mississippi also has the highest traffic fatality rate in the country and over the last decade 130 people have been killed by tractors. We need to pullout as soon as possible and divest quickly from John Deere.”

And we’ve still got forces there. Who will clean up this mess?

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER:

The Times had asked the professor, Mark von Hagen, to examine the coverage of the correspondent, Walter Duranty, after receiving a letter in early July from the Pulitzer Prize Board seeking its comment. In its letter to The Times, the board said it was responding to “a new round of demands” that the prize awarded to Mr. Duranty in 1932 be revoked. The most vocal demands came from Ukrainian-Americans who contended that Mr. Duranty should be punished for failing to report on a famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933.

In his report to The Times, Professor von Hagen described the coverage for which Mr. Duranty won the Pulitzer — his writing in 1931, a year before the onset of the famine — as a “dull and largely uncritical recitation of Soviet sources.”

“That lack of balance and uncritical acceptance of the Soviet self-justification for its cruel and wasteful regime,” the professor wrote, “was a disservice to the American readers of The New York Times and the liberal values they subscribe to and to the historical experience of the peoples of the Russian and Soviet empires and their struggle for a better life.”

In his eight-page report, Professor von Hagen, an expert on early 20th-century Russian history, did not address whether the Pulitzer Board should revoke the award it gave to Mr. Duranty. Mr. Duranty died in 1957.

But in comments first published yesterday in The New York Sun, Professor von Hagen said he believed the board should indeed take such action. He echoed those remarks in an interview last evening with The Times.

Better late than never, as I said.

CLAY SHIRKY HAS AN AMUSING OBSERVATION regarding restaurant reviews:

The Times coverage is unintentionally hilarious. Zagat uses cumulative anonymous ratings from diners who send in their opinions of various restaurants. The Times journalist, Florence Fabricant, goes on and on about how these ratings draw on as few as 100 people, obviously casting about for some way to explain how a 30 seat restaurant in Brooklyn could be rated above Alain Ducasse, where a bowl of soup will set you back almost forty dollars, while never noting that the alternative method of judgment — the impressions of a single restaurant reviewer — are a more limited sample.

Read it all.

STEPHEN BAINBRIDGE notes that UCLA’s undergraduate admissions program has generated a bit of controversy.

DAVID ADESNIK notes that some journalists are either bad at math, or just plain dishonest in their Iraq reportage.

DAVID HOGBERG has a roundup on the latest Krugman controversy, and the reactions thereto.

READ LILEKS ON THE RUMSFELD MEMO: It’s too good to excerpt. Someone should give a copy to the President.

UPDATE: Roger Simon liked Lileks’ piece. Donald Sensing, to put it mildly, didn’t. I have to say that I really didn’t read Lileks’ piece at all the way that Sensing did.

And read this from Tom Paine.

IAIN MURRAY has a new URL and a lot of interesting new posts.

BLOGGING HAS BEEN LIGHTER THAN USUAL — and perhaps a bit distracted — this week, because I’ve been busy in the run-up to the big law-school interviewing conference. I’m off later today, and I’ll spend the next couple of days in a hotel room talking to one law-prof candidate after another. Blogging will be light and intermittent, I suspect.

READER GARY HUDSON sends this link to the Methuselah Mouse Prize, a project dedicated to encouraging research aimed at retarding or reversing the aging process. Check it out. And if you’re a rich philanthropist, consider donating.

CALIFORNIA’S BUDGET CRISIS EXPLAINED:

It looks like taxpayers will indeed be footing the overtime bill to get the new, $225 million Carquinez Bridge finished in time for Gov. Gray Davis to cut the ribbon before he leaves office.

More than a dozen construction workers were called out Saturday and Sunday to help finish the electrical and other work that needed to be done to meet the new Nov. 8 deadline, a week ahead of schedule, reliable sources say.

And workers are expected to be out on the bridge this weekend as well.

“It really fries my (behind),” one contractor on the job told us. “They’re literally spending tens of thousands of dollars on overtime they don’t have.”

Note to Brad DeLong: I don’t actually mean that this “literally” explains the California budget crisis, all by itself.

A LOT OF PEOPLE ARE unhappy with Microsoft Office 2003. Jay Solo thinks it may be Microsoft’s 55 mph speed limit.

UPDATE: Kevin Aylward says people’s concerns on this front are bogus and unfounded.

Doesn’t matter to me. I’ll give up my WordPerfect when they pry it from my cold, dead hard drive.

LARRY LESSIG has more comments on the Broadcast Flag issue, though I stand by my earlier comment that they’re trying to keep people from “stealing” stuff that they can’t seem to give away.

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY’S first annual college-admissions survey is now online. TAPPED blogger Nick Confessore has an article in the issue.