IS THE ABA ENCOURAGING PEOPLE to break the law?

HOME AGAIN, HOME AGAIN, JIGGITY-JIG: Drove back from D.C. in the teeth of the fearsome East Coast Blizzard, which in fact, at least on our travel route, was more like the Brutal Afghan Winter than, say, the Blizzard of ’93. Some snow and ice, and a few flipped 18-wheelers, but not very bad really.

Back later. In the meantime, a nice summary of what’s really at stake in the Cartoon Wars:

Sari Hanafi, an associate professor at the American University in Beirut, said for Arab governments resentful of the Western push for democracy, the protests presented an opportunity to undercut the appeal of the West to Arab citizens. The freedom pushed by the West, they seemed to say, brought with it disrespect for Islam. Hanafi said the demonstrations “started as a visceral reaction — of course they were offended — and then you had regimes taking advantage, saying, ‘Look, this is the democracy they’re talking about.’ The protests also allowed governments to outflank a growing challenge from Islamic opposition movements by defending Islam.”

And note this:

“The wave swept many in the region. Sheik Muhammed Abu Zaid, an imam from the Lebanese town of Saida, said he began hearing of the caricatures from several Palestinian friends visiting from Denmark in December but made little of it. ‘For me, honestly, this didn’t seem so important,’ Abu Zaid said, comparing the drawings to those made of Jesus Christ in Christian countries. ‘I thought, I know that this is something typical in such countries,’ he recalled.”

Like race riots in the early 20th Century, this is a case of ignorant yahoos being exploited by elites in order to protect the elites’ power against civilizing influences.

THIS DOESN’T SOUND like much of a Homeland Security triumph:

The city’s ports, considered a major target of terrorists, are about to be taken over by a firm based in the United Arab Emirates, a country with financial links to the Sept. 11 hijackers.

Dubai Ports World is set to complete a $6.8 billion deal to purchase Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co., a London company that already runs commercial port operations in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans and Miami.

Color me unimpressed.

DID SOME BLOGGER INTERVIEWS at Bloggers’ Row yesterday for the next podcast, and tested out this cool but fairly cheap Olympus digital recorder. Listened to the results on headphones and they sound quite good — very clear despite considerable background noise. I wish everything got better and cheaper as fast as electronics are.

UPDATE: Reader C.G. Browning says that $200 isn’t cheap. Well, it depends — the pro models are much more expensive.

ANOTHER UPDATE: An anonymous reader from Australia writes: “Not everybody gets everything free the way you do.”

Actually, pretty much the only thing I get free is books, and the occasional DVD. When I write about gadgets, they’re gadgets I’ve bought myself. If someone were to send me a freebie for review, I’d note that.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Writing in the Washington Post, Michael Grunwald takes a broken-windows approach to pork:

[C]onventional wisdom is congealing around the notion that Congress is what it is, and can’t be changed.

But that was once conventional wisdom about New York, too. “The most important thing we’ve learned since the mid-’90s is that there’s plenty we can do to clean up bad neighborhoods,” said Northeastern University criminologist Jack Levin. It turns out that aggressive policing really can defeat an anything-goes mentality, that entrenched criminal cultures really can be reformed, that potential offenders tend not to offend when they believe their crimes will be witnessed, reported and punished. “At some point, people have to say: Enough is enough,” said Carnegie Mellon University criminologist Alfred Blumstein, author of “The Crime Drop in America.”

In Congress, unlike cities, reducing crime is less of an end in itself than a means to the end of better government; members of Congress, their aides and the lobbyists who schmooze them can victimize taxpayers without breaking any laws. Still, in this moment of runaway cynicism, it’s worth asking whether the strategies that cleaned up the mean streets can clean up K Street.

“Sure, why not?” Levin said. “You’ll have to change the culture. But we’ve learned a lot about how to do that.”

Thus culture change, and the broken-windows approach itself, is the underlying philosophy of PorkBusters, of course. Let’s keep it up.

Sen. Tom Coburn certainly is, as George Will notes:

Coburn is the most dangerous creature that can come to the Senate, someone simply uninterested in being popular. When House Speaker Dennis Hastert defends earmarks — spending dictated by individual legislators for specific projects — by saying that a member of Congress knows best where a stoplight ought to be placed, Coburn, in an act of lese-majeste, responds: Members of Congress are the least qualified to make such judgments.

Recently, when a Republican colleague called to say “his constituency” would not allow him to support Coburn on some measure, Coburn tartly told the senator that “there is not one mention in the oath [of office] of your state.” Senators are just not talked to that way under the ponderous rituals of vanity that the Senate pretends are mere politeness. . . .

Civilization depends on the ability to make even majorities blush, so it is momentous news that shame may be making a comeback, even on Capitol Hill, as a means of social control. Embarrassment is supposed to motivate improved education in kindergarten through 12th grade under the No Child Left Behind Act: That law provides for identifying failing schools, the presumption being that communities will blush, then reform. And embarrassment is Coburn’s planned cure for Congress’s earmark culture.

“Quite time-consuming” was Coburn and John McCain’s laconic description, in a letter to colleagues, of their threat to bring the Senate to a virtual standstill with challenges to earmarks. In 1999, while in the House, Coburn offered 115 anti-pork amendments to an agriculture bill — in effect a filibuster in a chamber that does not allow filibusters. Collaborating with Coburn makes McCain, the Senate’s dropout from anger management school, look saccharine.

When Coburn disparaged an earmark for Seattle — $500,000 for a sculpture garden — Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) was scandalized: “We are not going to watch the senator pick out one project and make it into a whipping boy.” She invoked the code of comity: “I hope we do not go down the road deciding we know better than home state senators about the merits of the projects they bring to us.” And she warned of Armageddon: “I tell my colleagues, if we start cutting funding for individual projects, your project may be next.” But Coburn, who does not do earmarks, thinks Armageddon sounds like fun.

I suspect that a lot of people will be doing their best to undermine Coburn as a result, but I also think that it’ll be pretty obvious what they’re really about.

UPDATE: Couldn’t find it earlier — I was rushed trying to get out of DC and into the blizzard — but here’s N.Z. Bear’s post from September on culture changes and the “broken windows” theory as applied to pork and PorkBusters.

POWER LINE is podcasting.

CARTOON WARS UPDATE: Ian Schwartz has the video of my appearance on CNN, in which I’m rather critical of CNN’s decision not to show the cartoons.

UPDATE: Read this, too.

And a further “Heh” to Tigerhawk.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Well, this review of my appearance may provide a new InstaPundit slogan: “Reynolds may be boring but at least he’s not an actor.”

Sissy Willis has a transcript, and corrects a minor mis-speak on my part that I didn’t realize I’d made before, though now I see that Abbie Tatton got me to correct myself without my even realizing it. Well, I was bone tired by then, having spent much of the day taping book-related TV and radios stuff. I think I finished well, though, even if I was boring. But hey, I’m a law professor. Boring is what we do best!

LOTS MORE OLYMPICS-BLOGGING over at the Gold Rush.

Well, it’s not like you’re going to see much of it here. . . .

THE BELMONT CLUB offers thoughts on why negotiation is likely to fail where Iran is concerned.

MORE ON THE EVER-EXPANDING U.N. PROCUREMENT SCANDALS from Claudia Rosett and George Russell.

NEXT, THEY CAME FOR VALENTINE’S DAY. Ignorant thuggery seems all the rage this week, and Jim Treacher is not amused with the thugs, or their enablers.

Here’s the latest Shire podcast on the Cartoon Wars.

Read this piece from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, too.

WITH A BLIZZARD hitting the East Coast later today, here’s some advice on safe home generator use from Popular Mechanics.

EGYPTIAN BLOGGER BIG PHARAOH has received Ten Commandments for Muslims. (Via Barcepundit).

Here’s one: “Thou shall understand that the West gets their info on Islam not from your preaching nor from the books you translate to them but from your actions.”

UPDATE: John Hinderaker has a big photo roundup on those actions.

A LOOK AT HARUN FAZUL, the “African bin Laden.”

YES, BLOGGING HAS BEEN LIGHT: Taped an episode of CNN’s On the Story last night that will air tonight at 7 ET (I’m in the second segment), about the Cartoon Wars. My opening line on CNN’s coverage: “You guys blew it.” I got less charitable from there.

ED DRISCOLL writes on the press as Victorian gentleman.

MORE ON CHINA:

Executives from Google Inc. and other Internet companies head to Capitol Hill next week, where they will become feature players in an awkward debate: Are U.S. companies giving in to China too easily?

Last month, Google announced an agreement with the Chinese government to censor search results from its Chinese site. It was the latest Internet company to accede to the Chinese government’s censorship restrictions, following Cisco Systems Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc.

I hope they find the eperience embarrassing.

I NEVER GOT OUT OF THE BOOK BOOTHS, but Sean Hackbarth captured an explosive comment by Ann Coulter. He reports that it played badly.

UPDATE: The Insta-Wife has photos from the book-booths, and so does Wendy Sullivan.

GOLD RUSH is a new Pajamas Media blog devoted to the Torino Olympics.

JOE WILSON, SADDAM, AND URANIUM FROM NIGER: Rand Simberg looks at a media myth that won’t die.

UPDATE: It’s Pamela’s blogiversary, and she’s celebrating: “Yellowcake for everyone!”

JON HENKE looks at a troubling story about Guantanamo. Given all the inaccurate reports we’ve heard about that facility, I think I’ll wait for confirmation on this, but it’s something that ought to be looked into.

“BUY DANISH” wins by a landslide.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Here’s the AP story on pork promised earlier. Excerpt:

A controversy over earmarks – the congressional name for funding pet projects – is particularly intense. Especially since one GOP-led committee compiled a secret tally sheet showing earmark requests made by Republicans calling for reform.

“Earmarks have become the currency of corruption,” Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., recently wrote Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill. “We can’t allow this to continue.”

High on the list of challenges for the GOP is the annual drafting of a budget. President Bush’s appearance on Friday’s program was a reminder that he’s calling for $70 billion in savings over five years from benefit programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and payments to farmers.

Read the whole thing. And also read this WSJ piece by Tom Coburn. (Free link).

SORRY BLOGGING HAS BEEN LIGHT but I’ve been awfully busy today. Got to meet a lot of cool bloggers at the booksigning, though. More on that later.

ANNE APPLEBAUM responds to blogospheric criticism, and Ed Morrissey replies to her response.

UPDATE: Several readers note that Anne Applebaum is one of the good guys, and that’s certainly true. And it’s very much to her credit that she’s engaging her critics here.