THE CARNIVAL OF RECIPES is up!

ANN ALTHOUSE: “Did you watch Congressman John Murtha on ‘Meet the Press’ today?”

Military blogger Matthew Heidt at BlackFive did, and wasn’t impressed by Murtha’s holding out Clinton’s treatment of Somalia as an example of successful wartime leadership.

UPDATE: Jeff Goldstein: “I’m afraid I don’t speak Murtha.”

Plus this: “Murtha is channeling Grandpa Simpson more every day.”

There seems to be a sudden surge of enthusiasm for Murtha challenger Diana Irey.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ian Schwartz has Murtha on video.

By way of contrast, here’s video of Diana Irey.

SIGNS OF SANITY at the Presbyterian Church (USA)? Apparently they’re backing away from an Israeli divestment move. “Just over an hour ago, the 62-member Peacemaking and International Issues Committee voted overwhelmingly to apologize for its action of two years ago and no longer officially endorse divestment.”

FIRST THEY BUILT KOS UP, now they want to tear him down. TNR’s The Plank notes a lot of stuff that’s coming out about Kos, Jerome Armstrong, etc. You can read the New York Times blog item here for the moment, and there’s a piece in the Post, too. And Mickey Kaus has thoughts. (But beware the name-similarity-based hostility!)

Is this a big deal? I’m not sure it ought to be. Blogs are a low-trust environment, and readers should be judging bloggers by what they say and how well they back it up, not by their credentials. On the other hand, it’s obvious that some blog readers are, well, not that bright and will do what they’re told without even following a link. (“Poor, uneducated, and easily led?”) But I think those are the exception, not the rule.

Still, for my bottom-line take, a suggestion that political consultants have a history of talking things up for personal gain seems less-than-earthshaking to me. Am I wrong here?

UPDATE: Don Surber says that I’m wrong.

Meanwhile, Dan Riehl is offering to undercut the competition.

MORE: Hmm, a growing chorus seems to think I’m wrong here. I’m sticking by my guns, though. And I really don’t think it’s fair to put Jerome Armstrong in the same category as Jason Leopold, Jeff Gannon, or Ben Domenech, as Surber does.

REMEMBERING FATHERS’ DAY at Ann Althouse’s.

A LOOK at cellular aging and anti-aging efforts.

GLENN GREENWALD SHOULDN’T BE THROWING STONES: At least not judging by my recent experience. In an earlier post from last week, I missed the fact that the Kos crowd had backed James Webb. I updated it when Markos and others emailed me, but that didn’t stop Glenn Greenwald from putting up a post savaging me for the error and including my email address in the claim that I wouldn’t correct the error:

I wonder whether Instapundit () will retract his false claim that the Virginia result represents a repudiation of the “the Howard Dean-Kos-fringe” given that this “fringe” supported the winning candidate.

As always, this has resulted in a steady trickle of mostly illiterate emails from Greenwald readers, none of whom seem to have actually read the post, or they’d know that I fixed the error days ago and that they wouldn’t have to “challenge” me to make the correction. But here’s my favorite email resulting from Greenwald’s post, from a guy named John Malloy:

Dear Glenn,

I read Glen Reynolds take down of your Virginia Senate Democratic Primary analysis. When are you going to fess up and admit you were completely wrong?

Oops. He seems to have his Glenns mixed up, something that it took a followup email from me to make clear. No wonder Greenwald has a thing about me — even when he gets something right, I get the credit! Meanwhile, Greenwald has never updated his post to note that I corrected the error, even though, as I say, it’s been days, meaning that each email from his readers merely confirms their cluelessness further. I’ll refrain, however, from publishing his email address over the matter, as I think it pretty much speaks for itself.

UPDATE: Apparently, I’m not the only one to have this experience. John Hinderaker emails:

Glenn, I laughed at your post about Glenn Greenwald and his readers. I’ve never looked at that site, but we can always tell when he’s attacked one of our posts because we get a stream of almost-identical emails of low literary quality, to say the least. But the funny thing about them is how obvious it is that the people who write them haven’t bothered to read our post! I’ve often scratched my head over what would motivate a person to take the trouble to write an email denouncing a post–but won’t, on the other hand, motivate him to take the trouble to read the post he’s attacking.

Yeah, go figure. It’s certainly nothing that makes me more likely to be persuaded.

MORE: Now Greenwald updates. I didn’t mean to suggest that his post went up after mine — sorry, as I can see why he’d think I was saying that; it was badly written. My complaint was that he never updated his post after I updated mine, so that I continued to get lame emails from his readers for days. As for his claims that I’m masquerading as a moderate — I don’t think I’m “moderate” at all. My views are pretty much orthogonal to the political spectrum. My ideal world, in which, as I’ve said before, happily married gay couples have closets full of assault weapons, isn’t exactly “moderate.” Greenwald’s also tired of being told that the emails he aims at other bloggers are lame and badly written. Well, if he’s hearing it a lot, it’s because it’s true. When three people tell you you’re drunk, it’s time to sit down.

STILL MORE: Reader Nathan Holmes sends a thoughtful and well-written email:

I like your blog and links, but since you are someone who consistently makes the case that the New York Times processes events through a particularly biased lens, you ought to fess up when you yourself make the same error. It isn’t just that you made a mistake about the minor detail of who supported James Webb in the Virginia primary- you made a mistake based on a false stereotype concerning the kind of candidates the Dean/Kos folks are supporting these days. Adjust your notion that the Dean/Kos wing is hard left, and hold yourself to the same standard that you hold the NY Times. Your blog will be better for it.

That’s a fair charge, I think — I did respond to a reader email based on a stereotype. The funny thing, though, is that I’m happy if the Kos crowd moves toward the middle, and I’ve been positive on James Webb all along. A smarter political move would have been for Kos supporters to gently correct me (a la the email above) and stress the common ground as a way of increasing support for their candidates. Instead, I got jumped on in a way that reinforces the worst stereotypes about the Democratic lefty blogosphere, and that suggests they’re more concerned with their own positioning than with their candidates’ winning.

SOME FURTHER THOUGHTS on the Rove non-indictment, with additional reflections on the Duke lacrosse case.

THE INSTA-WIFE OFFERS advice on dealing with people — especially spouses or boyfriend/girlfriends — who have Borderline Personality Disorder.

OUCH: A rather negative take on Jason Leopold’s “scoop.”

THE WASHINGTON POST REPORTS on Kurds in Virginia being mistreated by the FBI. (Via Max Sawicky, who has been on this story for a while.)

I understand the importance of cutting off money-flows to terrorists. But the FBI should understand the importance of distinguishing between terrorists and non-terrorists. Leaving aside the obvious downside of injustice, it’s just dumb. Our best line of defense against foreign terror, after all, has traditionally been the immigrant communities in which terrorists try to hide. Alienating them unnecessarily and unfairly is just dumb.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan seems to think that there’s something new about this position on my part, which shows that he’s woefully ignorant. Heck, I was making this point back when Sullivan was still publishing virtual love letters to President Bush, something that I’ve never done. Joining in popular hysteria about Guantanamo, however, is something different. But then, Sullivan’s been all over the place on that topic, too.

I admit that my early fears of police-statism were — as some warned me at the time — overstated. Nonetheless, I think that especially when we’re operating in a domestic rather than a battlefield context, it’s very important to be careful about these things. We can’t afford the frequent idiocies of law enforcement as usual.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader James Somers notices something I didn’t:

What struck (and annoyed) me about Sullivan’s swipe at you for your post on Kurds being mistreated by the FBI was Sullivan’s sarcastic remark that you had gone “all librul.” Maybe I’m a little sensitive, having grown up in the Ozarks, but I took the use of the word “librul” as a cheap shot at southerners, as Sullivan’s been on the warpath against red America in general lately. Which is ironic, given that it’s red America that largely supplied the electoral muscle to start the war in Iraq he spent so much of 2002 lusting after. How many of Sullivan’s neighbors in Provincetown supported Operation Iraqi Freedom?

Sullivan doesn’t understand the South, and cheap shots at the South, alas, have been one of his trademarks for a while. I suspect that those, at least, do play well in Provincetown.

WILL COLLIER LOOKS AT OUTMIGRATION FROM NEW YORK, and suggests an explanation that the New York Times neglected:

More interesting, however, is what the Times can’t bring itself to say in the story: there isn’t a single mention of New York’s high taxes and rampant government regulatory regimes, or the relative lack therof in the (er, “red”) Sun Belt states. Was it just too much trouble for the Times to admit that jobs (and thus people) are leaving for places that are more amenable to, you know, employers?

Apparently so.

BILL ROGGIO REPORTS FROM KANDAHAR on coalition offensives against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

TIME:

Al-Qaeda terrorists came within 45 days of attacking the New York subway system with a lethal gas similar to that used in Nazi death camps. They were stopped not by any intelligence breakthrough, but by an order from Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman Zawahiri. And the U.S. learned of the plot from a CIA mole inside al-Qaeda. . . .

The news left administration officials gathered in the White House with more questions than answers. Why was Ali cooperating? Why had Zawahiri called off the strike? Were the operatives planning to carry out the attack still in New York? “The CIA analysts attempted answers. Many of the questions were simply unanswerable.”

One man who could answer them was al-Ayeri — but he was killed in a gun battle between Saudi security forces and al Qaeda militants, who had launched a mini insurrection to coincide with the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Suskind quotes a CIA operative as questioning whether it was an accident that the Saudis had killed the kingpin who could expose a cell planning a chemical weapons attack inside the U.S. “The Saudis just shrugged,” the source tells Suskind. “They said their people got a little overzealous.”

Interesting.

TOM MAGUIRE has questions for Larry Johnson, and also bids a fond farewell — well, okay, a farewell, or at least a goodbye — to Dan Rather. Plus, Paul Krugman is sounding sensible.

DAVE HARDY: “Wonder if terrorist managers write CYA memos? ‘I told them months ago things were going downhill, and made suggestions. Did anyone listen? Noooo….'”

A SADDAM-TALIBAN CONNECTION, according to captured Iraqi documents.

A HIGH SCHOOL with Forty-one valedictorians.

ROBERT KC JOHNSON looks at developments at Duke: “As the presumed ‘facts’ initially associated with the Duke lacrosse case have melted away, those on campus who aggressively condemned the lacrosse players have found themselves in an uncomfortable position. . . . In short, rather than admit that their initial attacks on the lacrosse players’ character contributed to what David Brooks correctly has termed a ‘witch hunt,’ the Duke administration and the players’ faculty critics have acted as if their negative judgments always revolved around the alcohol issue—despite clear evidence to the contrary.”

THE CARNIVAL OF CARS is up!

Taken from the veranda of That Place on 98, a terrific seafood place just east of Apalachicola on, natch, US 98. It was about 9 last night.

SCIENCE FICTION PUBLISHING LEGEND JIM BAEN has had a stroke. Please wish him well.

HERE’S MORE on Dennis Hastert’s earmark-related dubious land deal. Read this post from Mark Tapscott, on Hastert and earmarker-in-chief Jerry Lewis, too.

WHAT SCHOOLS WOULD LOOK LIKE if they favored boys as much as current schools favor girls.

THE ECONOMIST SURVEYS THE STATE of search-engine competition and notes that Google’s competitors are gearing up. I think that Google is vulnerable, since competition is just a mouse-click away.

On the other hand, when it comes to China censorship, Yahoo! is the worst.