ZIMBABWE UPDATE: Opposition braced for dirty war as Mugabe clings on to power.

POLITICO: No Campus Surge for Obama in Pennsylvania.

TODAY WAS THE FIRST REALLY NICE DAY in a bit, and although I was busy I managed to get out with the D300 and take a few pictures. I took Ken Rockwell’s advice and turned the saturation way up. This worked well for the flower, but I think it was a bit much for the already-vivid green of springtime grass in Tennessee. He’s in California, where I think the colors tend to be a bit muted. Still, it looks good.

Don’t know why he brought his Mercedes to the park for polishing, but he looked like he was enjoying it.

A REPORT FROM BAGHDAD.

VIDEO: Charlton Heston on gun rights.

G.M. ROPER on the politics of hope.

SOME PEOPLE WOULD CERTAINLY LIKE FOR THIS TO BE TRUE: Dan Senor: Condoleezza Rice Is Pursuing the VP Spot. And it’s probably good for McCain if a potential running mate has more actual experience than both of his potential opponents put together.

WORKING TOO HARD CAN GIVE YOU A heart attack-ack-ack-ack-ack. You oughta know by now.

ECONOMICS: Reader John Lewis emails a number of center-right blogs:

I’m a long time reader and fan of your blogs and a staunch Republican, but am increasingly worried that the approach to ignore or minimize economic bad news is not going to work in this election cycle. It seems to me that none of you are particularly interested in economics, however, I’m afraid that we are all going to be interested by the time this business cycle is over. There is a very good chance that the unemployment rate will be significantly higher this November than November of 1996.

This may well be true; we’re overdue for a recession — we haven’t had a really deep one in over 25 years — and my sense is that there remains a lot of economic idiocy still to be wrung out of the system, which is what recessions are for.

Speaking for myself, though, I’m not an econo-blogger. I tend to be over-pessimistic, but I guess I have tuned out a lot of the media econo-doomsaying because they’ve been predicting massive economic collapse for pretty much my entire sensate life and so far it hasn’t come. Plus, at the moment they’re playing their usual pre-election gloom-and-doom game in the hopes of helping the Democrats.

Which doesn’t mean that the economy is necessarily doing better than they say, since their bias is exceeded only by their laziness and ignorance. As I noted some years ago about their Iraq reporting, the fact that they’re transparently playing up bogus bad news doesn’t mean that there isn’t genuine bad news that they’re not reporting, because reporting that would require knowledge and effort. So you can’t just apply “Kentucky windage” and assume that things are better than the reports say. They may actually be worse, just in a different way than is reported . . .

Lewis continues:

There are a large number of recent proposals and actions by both Democrats and Republicans that fly in the face of any sort of capitalist belief system and will almost certainly serve to extend the depth and duration of the downturn. Bailing out homeowners? By whom? Renters? I shudder to think about how socialist we could become under a Democratic administration. The proposals by Clinton and Obama have been astounding.

Bottom line is that I am surprised by how little interest has been shown by conservative (or libertarian) blogs in the ongoing financial crisis. There seems to be no one in the conservative political blogosphere standing up against these dramatic expansions of government programs and interventions into our markets.

He’s right about this. The bailout-and-regulation proposals seem more like payoffs and power-grabs than good policy to me. Anyway, here’s a post by Professor Bainbridge that addresses some of these issues. And I love this bit: “bursting of bubbles inevitably leads to ‘a kind of speculative frenzy in regulation.’”

We’re probably seeing that now.

UPDATE: A hedge-fund reader emails:

Defending free markets and letting risk takers take their lumps is simply outside the realm of polite public discourse these days.

Most folks in hedgefundland are seething at the upcoming spin of the regulatory and tax ratchets, but the chattering classes only extol an expansion of the regulatory gobbledygook that got us here.

Bernanke’s repeated blinking when confronted with chaos, first during the SocGen debacle in January and recently with Bear Stearns, left laissez faire folks no political cover.

Free market types assume silence is preferable to calling in mortar fire on themselves.

Well, that’s a cheerful take. If the folks in hedgefundland are unhappy with what the Chattering Classes are saying, my suggestion is to do something about it. Emailing bloggers is a start, but only a very small one!

And Sean Hackbarth protests that he’s been covering this stuff.

MORE: Thanks, Gerard. And it’s hard to argue with this: “If They Could Do Math, They Wouldn’t Have Been Journalism Majors.”

A REASON TO SIGN UP FOR ANONYMIZER?

The online behavior of a small but growing number of computer users in the United States is monitored by their Internet service providers, who have access to every click and keystroke that comes down the line.

The companies harvest the stream of data for clues to a person’s interests, making money from advertisers who use the information to target their online pitches.

The practice represents a significant expansion in the ability to track a household’s Web use because it taps into Internet connections, and critics liken it to a phone company listening in on conversations. But the companies involved say customers’ privacy is protected because no personally identifying details are released.

Kinda irritating, anyway.

OUR FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT: Not Bill Clinton, but Warren Harding. Though the two share some traits.

POCKET ROCKET: Remembering the Acura Integra GS-R.

JOHN BIRMINGHAM: Bring on the Multiverse!

A NEW KIND OF POLITICS: “Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) declined twice Saturday to personally repudiate a liberal radio host’s declaration that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is a ‘warmonger.'”

Apparently, Obama lacks the backbone to repudiate any of his supporters. I’m not the first to note the contrast here. I expect the press to give him a pass on it, but people will notice nonetheless.

THE LONDON TIMES: Iran joined militias in battle for Basra. Another thing that Nancy Pelosi doesn’t want to hear about, I suspect.

VIDEO: motorcycle-jumping records broken. Plus, sword-swallowing and gratuitous dancing girls. And fireworks! What’s not to love?

ANDREW BOLT NOTES “a marker indicating what a PR disaster the Olympics have turned out to be so far for China, when even Rudd is now nervous about saying he’ll go.”

HEH: Gore-o-theism?

NOTE FROM THE DEAN: My colleague Greg Stein has published two form letters for Deans to use in response to U.S. News rankings changes, in the Chicago Tribune. And I love the bio tag at the end.