A LOOK AT WHO’S CARRYING WATER FOR CHAVEZ, and why.

A LOOK AT REPUTATION ON THE WEB: “Nobody knows you’re a dog on the Web–or a mechanic, athlete, hacker, marketing whiz, zealot, or SQL programmer. That is, unless you tell them. In which case, they may or may not believe you, and they have few options for verifying your credentials anyway. . . . Make no mistake, though; online identities matter, and they’ll matter even more as the number of blogs, wikis, and social networks grows, making it increasingly difficult to sort out the Web’s wheat from the chaff of misinformation, factual errors, and malware. What we need–bloggers, businesspeople, technology professionals–are better ways to let others know who we are, verifying what we tell them and showing that we’ve got the cred to back it up.” People are working on it.

A SAVAGE DIAGNOSIS: “Everybody wants to save Darfur but no one will do the obvious thing. Everyone bemoans what’s happening to Zimbabwe but no one will touch Mugabe. Everyone knows what Iran is up to, but heaven forfend we should do anything serious about it. Everyone sees that Putin is finlandizing Europe—I mean, he just said “I will nuke you if you try to defend yourselves against Iran”—but he’s an honored guest at the big banquets. etcetera, etcetera.”

A HUGO CHAVEZ ROUNDUP from Gateway Pundit (who, by the way, is blogging from the Democracy and Security Conference in Prague at the moment).

CRIME OF THE CENTURY: “Columnist and author Eric Alterman was arrested Sunday night inside the debate spin room and charged with criminal trespass after police say he refused repeated orders to leave.”

UPDATE: Eric Alterman tells his side of the story. Click “read more” to read it.

FROM J.D. JOHANNES, a tale of two wars.

A ROUNDUP of novels for teenage girls.

I’VE HEARD BILL O’REILLY GOING ON about sex education at Boulder High School, but I haven’t been paying much attention. On the other hand, Dave Kopel has been.

SCARE HEADLINE OF THE WEEK: “Ethanol boom may fuel shortage of tequila.”

STEVE GILLIARD has died.

ANN ALTHOUSE IS WATCHING the Democratic debate in New Hampshire.

So is Jim Geraghty.

UPDATE: Dave Weigel, too. Best line: “a nice, 3rd grade homeroom tone.” Plus this: “If we repeal the Bush tax cuts, can I have a lifetime supply of root beer and a perpetual motion machine? Because apparently repealing them would pay for everything.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: More at The Hotline blog.

MORE: Upside: The Iran problem, solved!

And Rudy Giuliani concludes that the lesson of the debate is that “America needs a strong leader like Rudy Giuliani.”

STILL MORE: More debate posts here and here.

THOUGHTS ON LOWERING THE DRINKING AGE, at State 29.

MORE CRITICISM of The Economist. It does seem to have gone downhill lately.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Meet the new boss, yada yada:

After promising unprecedented openness regarding Congress’ pork barrel practices, House Democrats are moving in the opposite direction as they draw up spending bills for the upcoming budget year.

Democrats are sidestepping rules approved their first day in power in January to clearly identify “earmarks” — lawmakers’ requests for specific projects and contracts for their states.

Rather than including specific pet projects, grants and contracts in legislation as it is being written, Democrats are following an order by the House Appropriations Committee chairman to keep the bills free of such earmarks until it is too late for critics to effectively challenge them. . . . What Obey is doing runs counter to new rules that Democrats promised would make such spending decisions more open.

I really didn’t think that the new Democratic Congress would — could! — turn out to be worse than the Republicans. But this is just another case of my political expectations, despite their modesty, being disappointed.

MORE NUMBERS ON IRAQ, FROM JOHN WIXTED:

Having brought to you the continuing bad news about the security situation in Iraq, I did also want to remind you that, when asked, more Iraqis than not say that life is better today than it was under Saddam Hussein. This always amazes me because, if you ask around, you’ll find that almost every opponent of the invasion of Iraq believes that we have simply ruined a stable country that, as bad it was, was nevertheless much better than what it has become. But as I have noted before, if you ask the Iraqi people themselves (who should know), they disagree. . . . That tells you something that is largely missing from discussions about Iraq. What’s missing is an assessment of what things were like in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. The media was not interested in that, so they did not fill in the blanks for you.

No, they were busy actively covering up problems in Iraq so as to maintain “access” under Saddam. Read the whole thing.

IMAGINE.

A LOOK AT WHAT’S GOING ON IN FALLUJAH, where things aren’t as peaceful as they are in Ramadi and Hit.

DO CHEAP CONSUMER GOODS produce a lack of hands-on skills? I’m not so sure, but Sarah Natividad thinks they do.

TAKE OUT A WARRANT FOR FRAUD: Red-light camera gets wrong person.

THE BLIND LEADING THE DISHONEST: George Stephanopoulos and John Murtha on the JFK terrorist plot.

DOES THE DANGEROUS BOOK FOR BOYS MARK A CULTURAL MOMENT? Consider this piece from The New York Times:

I remember we called it “play.” It occurred on weekends and after school, when the grown-ups weren’t around. Sometimes it hurt. It hurt when the ball struck someone in the face. It hurt when the thing we were climbing — the tree, the fire escape, the face of the sandstone cliff beside the river — suddenly grew slippery or broke. But those were mere physical injuries. They healed, often after trips to the emergency room. The injuries that lingered were the emotional ones, incurred when someone came in last in one of the contests we dreamed up. And, being boys (girls were simply not part of our thinking), we made contests out of everything, from walking, balance-beam style, down the railroad tracks to collecting crawfish from the creek.

Who knew at the time (not we children, certainly, growing up more than 30 years ago in small-town Minnesota) that playing and getting hurt would come to be regarded later on as exotic, threatened activities sorely in need of a cultural revival led by concerned adults?

Read on and you’ll find some pushback, along with what appears to be a bit of wilful misunderstanding, but that itself is more evidence for the cultural-moment theory. (As Chris Nolan emails: “The politically correct, multicultural ‘it’s all about nurture’ set are getting defensive. Must be a cultural moment indeed.”) And I think that he’s got it all wrong. There’s nothing contrived, or expert-driven, about saying “Go outside and play.” It’s what parents do. The real problem is that the kind of nannyism that leads to the criminalization of napping has gotten in the way.

UPDATE: More thoughts here.

WHAT IF ISRAELIS HAD abducted a BBC man?

IN THE MAIL: Tobias Buckell’s new science fiction novel, Ragamuffin. The cover art lacks the retro-cool of his previous novel, Crystal Rain, but I’ve started the book and it’s good — kind of post-cyberpunk, vaguely reminiscent of Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon or Chris Moriarty’s Spin State.

Should make good beach reading. Plus, scroll down here to get the first 1/3 of Crystal Rain for free online.

JOHN TIERNEY SEEKS ethical enlightenment. I don’t think it will come from ethicists, though.

THE GUARDIAN: “Truth about Kyoto: huge profits, little carbon saved.”

Carbon markets aren’t inherently dishonest, but all you needed to know to predict this particular state of affairs is contained in this sentence: “While the CDM is run under the umbrella of the UN, the second market is overseen by the European commission.”