DEER GONE WILD, in New Haven.

JOSEPH MYERS: “Words matter, and in the global war on terror we are losing the battle of words, in a self-inflicted defeat. The consequences could not be more profound.”

HILLARY VS. THE ECONOMISTS.

AND YET, THAT’S AN ACCOMPLISHMENT: Stating the obvious at the New York Times.

HELP A MOM OUT: N.Z. Bear emails:

Patti Patton-Bader, founder of Soldiers’ Angels, is one of the fifteen semi-finalists in NBC’s “America’s Favorite Mom” contest. There are five categories, and she is nominated with two other mom’s in the “military mom’s” category. The winner receives a $250,000 cash prize, and Patti has said she’d like to use the money to build a ranch for soldiers and their families to vacation at with assistance from Angel families.

Tomorrow, Patti will be featured in the morning on NBC’s Today Show, and all day tomorrow (but ONLY tomorrow) folks will have the opportunity to vote for her at http://www.nbc.com/Americas_Favorite_Mom/ . Allegedly everyone can vote up to ten times per email address, so I’m hoping folks will vote early and often!

What he said.

SHOULD YOU BUY A NIKON D300? As I’ve said before — notwithstanding my love for mine — the answer is almost certainly “no.” But if you’re looking at getting a Nikon digital SLR, this might not be a bad time to pick up one of the cheaper ones. My secretary is, and she found this discount deal from Nikon. Buy a D40, a D60, or a D80 body-and-lens kit, and one of three lenses — the AF-S DX Zoom-NIKKOR 55-200mm f/4-5.6G ED lens, the AF-S VR Zoom-NIKKOR 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G IF-ED lens, or the AF-S DX VR Zoom-NIKKOR 55-200mm IF-ED lens and you’ll get an instant $100 discount. Play your cards right and you’ll have a superb digital SLR with two excellent lenses for less than half the body-only cost of the D300.

UPDATE: Reader Dan K. emails: “Great. Now you say ‘No’ to buying a D300…three days after I put my order in for the D300/18-200VR.” Hey, I’m not saying don’t buy one — they rock. I’m just saying it’s a lot more camera than most people need. If you do buy one, you won’t regret it, save perhaps financially.

IN BOLIVIA, A REBUKE TO EVO MORALES:

SANTA CRUZ DE LA SIERRA, Bolivia — While sporadic street battles erupted, voters in this divided country’s richest and second most-populous province appeared to approve a controversial measure Sunday that would make them autonomous from the leftist government of President Evo Morales.

According to an exit poll by the firm Captura Consulting, 82.7 percent of voters in Santa Cruz province supported the autonomy referendum, creating what promises to be a tense standoff between Morales and provincial leaders. The exit poll surveyed 7,980 people.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: More at Gateway Pundit.

NOEMIE EMERY on Hillary’s strange new respect. “Hillary may still be a nanny-state type in some of her policies, but in her own life she seems more and more of a Social Darwinian, refusing to lose, and insisting on shaping her destiny. If the fittest survive, she intends to be one of them.”

I’VE MENTIONED BEFORE that I think we have a dysfunctional political class in this country. Here’s more evidence:

This tiff over gas and oil taxes only highlights the intellectual policy confusion – or perhaps we should say cynicism – of our politicians. They want lower prices but don’t want more production to increase supply. They want oil “independence” but they’ve declared off limits most of the big sources of domestic oil that could replace foreign imports. They want Americans to use less oil to reduce greenhouse gases but they protest higher oil prices that reduce demand. They want more oil company investment but they want to confiscate the profits from that investment. And these folks want to be President?

Sadly, one of them will be.

UPDATE: More from Philo of Alexandria.

Incoherence in energy policy and other areas stems in part from paying attention to polls. Even if every individual person had a coherent view of the subject matter—a plainly counterfactual assumption!—the collection of majority views might turn out to be incoherent.

But I think there’s a deeper reason, one that underlies dysfunctional behavior on the part of our politicians in many areas. They refuse to recognize that the policies they enact (or, in some cases, even discuss) affect incentives. So, they systematically ignore the effects of what they do. And that leads them to ignore the interactions between their various policies. They don’t see the incoherence of their positions because they never relate them to each other.

Indeed.

I MENTIONED HILLARY’S GUN-RIGHTS ATTACK ON OBAMA the other day, but now Ben Smith at Politico has picked up on the story, too.

UPDATE: Oops:

Senator Hillary Clinton’s mailing attacking Senator Barack Obama’s record on guns appears to include a striking visual gaffe: The image of the gun pictured on the face of the mailing is reversed, making it a non-existent left-handed model of the Mauser 66 rifle.

To make matters worse, a prominent gun dealer said, it’s an expensive German gun with customized features that make it clearly European.

I guess it was aimed at her foot, too . . . .

RE-AIMING RED-LIGHT CAMERAS in Arizona.

HILLARY AND OBAMA: Differences on display: “Clinton was funny, cracking jokes (this time about Rush Limbaugh), and looking and sounding like she is having fun. Barack Obama, as John points out, was dour, humorless, and emotionally remote. She was supposedly the one with the harsh and cold personality when this campaign started. Somewhere along the way things changed.”

DON SURBER:

Question: How deep is the trouble that Democratic Sen. Barack Obama is in?

Answer: Kerry deep.

Much more at the link.

OBAMA’S SECRET WEAPON. It’s working.

ISLAMIST CHICKENS ROOSTING in America’s backyard?

COURTHOUSE PIPE-BOMBED — has anyone heard from Bill Ayers?

NEWSWEEK: Why Oprah Winfrey left Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church. “There is the Church of Oprah now.” On the other hand, there’s also this report.

WATCHING PULP FICTION WITH Quentin Tarantino.

AUSTIN BAY: Dirty water kills.

SOMEHOW I MISSED THIS STORY: Bikinigate!

TAXPROF OFFERS A Clinton, McCain & Obama Gas Tax Roundup.

RAND SIMBERG HAS THOUGHTS on space development and ITAR. (That’s the International Traffic in Arms Regulations.)

DEMS PLANTING QUESTIONS AT MCCAIN TOWN HALL: Gateway Pundit has followed the story as it has developed. Question: If these were “ordinary people” who registered as journalists from, say, Talon News instead of the HuffPo, and they asked a question involving an obscenity to Barack Obama at a town hall meeting, would the press treat the story the same way?

IN THE MAIL: Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World. From the jacket copy: “This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else.” Which is a good thing, right?

UPDATE: Some related thoughts here.