PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: I was talking about PorkBusters on CNN earlier today. Ian Schwartz has the video. Jeff Jarvis — who was on the show too — has thoughts on PorkBusters and paramedia.

ALBION’S SEEDLING is a weblog devoted to Anglosphere matters.

TOM MAGUIRE:

Neither the Times nor the WaPo seem able to keep certain details of the Wilson/Plame/”16 Words” saga in proper order. . . .

The WaPo continues to amuse as they explain Wilson’s motivation:

“The Niger claim was central to the White House’s rationale for war.”

So central that it was not part of either the 2003 State of the Union or Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN on the case for war.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Heh.

SERENITY was number two in the box-office rankings this weekend.

BIPARTISAN IDIOCY: Here’s a list of congresspeople who are pushing the broadcast flag.

IT’S BOOBIES — and in a good cause! It’s the annual blogger boobiethon.

I HAVEN’T READ CHRIS MOONEY’S BOOK, The Republican War on Science, but I suspect that he makes a lot of points that — given my longstanding problems with the Bush Administration’s positions on cloning, etc., and the Kass Council — I probably agree with.

On the other hand, Virginia Postrel takes a different position:

U.S. scientists and their supporters tend to assume biomedical research is threatened by know-nothings on religious crusades. But as the Canadian law illustrates, the long-term threat to genetic research comes less from the religious right than from the secular left. Canada’s law forbids all sorts of genetic manipulations, many of them currently theoretical. It’s a crime, for instance, to alter inheritable genes.

And the law has provisions the fabled religious right never even talks about. It’s a crime to pay a surrogate mother or to make or accept payment for arranging a surrogate. It’s a crime to pay egg or sperm donors anything more than “receipted expenses,” like taxi fares. Since eggs are used not just in fertility treatments but in research, this prohibition stifles both.

Meanwhile, in backward, intolerant America objections to embryonic stem-cell research and therapeutic cloning are less politically persuasive than they were a few years ago. With the support of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Congress is close to a veto-proof majority to expand federal subsidies for embryonic stem-cell research. Many conservative leaders are uncomfortable opposing potentially lifesaving research.

Read the whole thing. The problem, alas, is that there are lots of anti-science types on both ends of the political spectrum.

SUICIDE BOMBING at the University of Oklahoma: Gateway Pundit has a roundup.

EVAN COYNE MALONEY HAS AN UPDATE on the Bucknell “hunting terrorists” fiasco. A secondary scandal is that the President of Bucknell University cannot use the word “inferred” correctly in a sentence.

GOOD NEWS FROM IRAQ, via the The New York Times:

Along the way, the American 1st Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division and the Iraqi 2nd Battalion, 2nd Brigade of the 5th Division have become a rare pairing of the two armies in Iraq. While some Iraqi soldiers have been criticized by their American counterparts for a lack of discipline and commitment, the Iraqis at Normandy have become so efficient that they took the lead in military operations in their 1,200-square-mile area.

“When people say it’s horrible that you are training those Iraqi soldiers because they will never be as good as we are, they are missing the point,” said Capt. Mike Whitney, commander of the 1-30th’s Alpha Company. “No, the Iraqis will never be as good as we are, but they don’t have to be. They just have to be better than anybody they face here.”

Read the whole thing, which interestingly appears in the Sports section.

UPDATE: And don’t miss this post on military recruiting from The Mudville Gazette.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Dwight Green emails:

“No, the Iraqis will never be as good as we are, but they don’t have to be. They just have to be better than anybody they face here.”

It is funny that newspapers have been so critical of the U.S. Government (including the Knight Ridder papers), whether under Clinton or Bush. And I’m not just talking about getting somewhere between everything and most everything wrong on many unfolding stories.

I can’t get the San Jose Mercury News to change my subscription from every day to weekends only. If this were Iraq, I’m sure I could file this under U.S. military incompetence. As it is, they can only blame the contracted deliverer. As someone else has said, I’m tempted to say screw him and screw the company. However I won’t stoop to that level, even if the contractor is simply a mercenary.

Thank goodness the boots on the ground in Iraq are consistently better than many service employees here in the U.S. OK, a little harsh, but then they are too without ever looking in the mirror.

Thank goodness the military isn’t as bad as my newspaper.

Ouch.

I’M SUPPOSED TO BE ON CNN about 1:30 ET, talking about PorkBusters, Tom Delay, Judith Miller, etc. If you’re new to this, here’s the background, and here’s the PorkBusters webpage.

UPDATE: Here’s a transcript.

GENERAL DAVID PETRAEUS spoke at Princeton on the Iraq situation and TigerHawk has a report.

TOM MAGUIRE has more thoughts on the Judith Miller story. More here.

“THE MOST PAINFUL CORRECTION” at the New York Times.

UPDATE: More here and here.

BLOGGING HAS BEEN LIGHT, because we’re over hanging out with my grandmother. My mom’s off to Hilton Head for a while, and we’re swapping off the grandmother-sitting with my sister. I’ve been going through some of her old pictures and making digital copies. Here are a couple of her and my grandfather at Daytona in 1938, a year before my mother was born.

Everybody who’s old was young once; we know this, of course, but it’s surprisingly easy not to really think about it. Lileks could give you a thousand words on that, but all I can give you are the pictures.

SHOOTING DOGS in New Orleans. (Via Bill Quick).

DAVID EDELSTEIN liked Serenity, but really loved Firefly.

MORE ON BILL BENNETT AND INTERPRETIVE THEORY, from Jeff Goldstein.

Related thoughts on language here.

UPDATE: More thoughts here.

SCOOTER LIBBY AND JUDITH MILLER: Power Line has the documents.

IS SPACE SPENDING PORK? Sometimes.

WHAT I’M READING: Richard Morgan’s latest, Woken Furies: A Takeshi Kovacs Novel. I’m in the bookwriting crunch period, and I had tried to quit reading novels to get more done, but discovered that losing that downtime actually hurt rather than helped.

I like this book so far — I’ve liked his earlier Takeshi Kovacs novels, like Altered Carbon and Broken Angels. (Market Forces, on the other hand, left me cold and I didn’t finish it — a book with that title should have a more economically plausible setting.)

ON AVERAGE, THEN, I guess the Bennett Brothers are being treated fairly: “While Robert Bennett is drawing insufficient criticism for blaming Scooter Libby for Judith Miller’s stay in prison, his brother Bill Bennett is taking unjustified heat for comments he made on the subject of abortion.”

A DEFENSE of Yahoo! et al. in terms of cooperation with the Chinese government.

SOME THOUGHTS on the economic impact of an avian flu pandemic. Meanwhile, here’s troubling news about Tamiflu resistance.

UPDATE: “And the worst part? No chicken soup.” Uh oh.

I AGREE WITH PHIL BOWERMASTER STEPHEN GORDON: Why can’t we get the $100 laptop here?