COTTAGE INDUSTRY AND SCIENCE FICTION: Glenn Reynolds interviews science fiction author S.M. Stirling in his new Tech Central Station column.

YOU JUST CAN’T PLEASE SOME PEOPLE: Liberal hawks who are lumped in with conservatives by anti-war liberals may be amused to see that even anti-war lefties like Marc Cooper get the same treatment for being insufficiently anti-war.

SHE WORE A SHORT SKIRT, or BLAMING THE VICTIM: Martin Kramer slaps Juan Cole after Cole slaps journalist Steve Vincent for supposedly getting himself killed in Iraq. (Hat tip: Tony at Across the Bay.)

AGAINST RACIAL PROFILING: You’re a news and politics junky. So you already know the usual arguments against racial (and perhaps gender) profiling. Here’s one I’ll bet you haven’t read yet at The New Criterion’s blog Armavirumque.

ZERO TOLERANCE FOR ZERO TOLERANCE: Radley Balko has a smart op-ed in the Washington Post about draconian zero tolerance measures against parents who wisely choose to supervise underage drinking.

GUEST-BLOGGER LINKS GUEST-BLOGGER: Gay sex advice columnist Dan Savage is guest-blogging for Andrew Sullivan this week. He says he’s “the only professional sex advice columnist in the United States, if not the world, to come out in favor of the invasion of Iraq.” That has to be right.

GATEWAY PUNDIT reports more bad news from Beslan, Russia.

SEGREGATION IN LIBERAL DRAG: Johann Hari says British multiculturalism amounts to segregation. The solution, he says, isn’t a return to Britain’s monocultural past. The solution, instead, lies in the glorious mixing of races.

YOU CAN’T TAKE THE SKY FROM ME: Sara T. Hinson sees libertarianism at the heart of Joss Whedon’s fantastic and wrongly cancelled Firefly series. I wrote my own non-political review of Firefly – which will continue on the big screen as Serenity this September – here.

(Hat tip: fellow fan Julian Sanchez at Hit and Run.)

THE WARNING OF A CIVIL WAR: Britain’s MI5 intelligence chiefs are warning Tony Blair that Britain may face an Islamist insurgency – in Britain. Seems a bit overstated to me, but then I’m not an intelligence chief.

A CURIOUS OMISSION: A Lebanese blogger wonders why there is no jihad against China.

RED FASCISTS AND BLACK FASCISTS: Neo-Neocon posted a unique analysis of the perverse symbiotic relationship between certain kinds of far-leftists and certain kinds of far-rightists.

FELLOW CENTRIST MICHAEL LIND has some advice for the Democratic Party over at TPM Café. He thinks that if they want to be the majority party again they will need to become economically liberal and socially conservative:

Social liberals can be the minority in a majority party. Or social liberals can be the majority in a minority party. But social liberals can’t be the majority in a majority party–not in the United States, not in the foreseeable future. There just aren’t enough social liberals in the American electorate.

His argument is worth reading as an intellectual exercise, but his advice isn’t practical. Social liberals are temperamentally incapable of tactically morphing into social conservatives. As Rick Heller notes over at Centerfield, social liberalism is the core value of the Democratic Party right now.

Social liberals should be temperamentally capable of morphing into defense hawks, however. That’s exactly what they did in the mid-to-late 1990s. Then it was the Democrats, not the Republicans, who agitated for war against Slobo’s regime in Belgrade for the crushing of Bosnia and Kosovo. Trent Lott and Tom DeLay were the ones who sounded like 1960s leftovers. Reflexive anti-war sentiment among Democrats isn’t as deeply ingrained as it appears.

As far as I’m concerned, social liberalism is the best thing the Democratic Party has going for it. They should keep that and drop the pacifism and isolationism instead. They’ll get a lot more votes next time around if they do. Plenty of socially liberal people voted for George W. Bush on national security grounds. Some of us would go home again if we could.

UPDATE: Jesse Walker at Hit and Run responds.

Just last year the warbloggers were warning that Kerry would submit America’s foreign policy to a nefarious “global test.” The man and his party were damned for their excessive faith in the United Nations, multilateralism, and the power of the well-crafted treaty. And now they’re supposed to be isolationists?

Jesse is quite right that Kerry wasn’t an isolationist. Although I should add that Kerry did get an enthusiastic response when he complained that we are closing down firehouses in the United States while opening them up in Baghdad. That sounded to me like something Pat Buchanan would say and something Rush Limbaugh would have said had a Democrat been president. Still, I wasn’t thinking of Kerry when I wrote this, and I should have taken him into account. He did win the Democratic primary, after all.

I wrote “isolationism” instead of “excessive multilateralism” because I’ve been hearing more complaints of that variety lately — especially since the London attacks on 7/7. Bush and Blair are supposedly making the problem of terrorism against Westerners worse because we have boots on the ground in Iraq in the first place, not because the U.N. didn’t come with us. The multilateralist argument seems to have receded into the background.

THANKS TO GLENN REYNOLDS for giving me, Megan McArdle, and Ann Althouse the keys to Instapundit while he’s on vacation. We’ll try to keep things interesting around here. The three of us have somewhat different reading tastes than Glenn, so this week’s Instalanches will fall on new territory.

WHY KERRY LOST: It may be presumptuous to say John Kerry lost the election for the reasons I personally voted against him. But I’ve decided to say it anyway.

I didn’t vote for George W. Bush in 2000. I’ve never voted for any Republican president. This time was my first. And I did so because of the Terror War.

I know quite a few people who didn’t support Bush last time but did support him this time. And every single one of them did so for the same reasons I did. Because of the Terror War. Because Kerry could not be trusted.

I don’t know of anyone, anywhere, who swung from Al Gore to George W. Bush because of gay marriage, tax cuts, or for any other reason. I’m not saying they don’t exist. But if they do exist, I haven’t heard of ’em. They’re an invisible, miniscule minority.

There aren’t enough of us liberal hawks, disgruntled Democrats, neo-neoconservatives – or whatever else you might want to call us – to trigger a political realignment. But it does appear we can swing an election. At least we can help. And though I don’t think of myself as conservative (I did just vote for a Democratic Congress), my alienation from the liberal party is total. A political party that thinks crying Halliburton! is a grown-up response to anti-totalitarian war just isn’t serious.

I may vote for the Democratic candidate next time around. Then again, I might not. I’ll be watching what happens over the next four years, trying to decide if I’m part of the new wave of neoconservatives or if I’m just Independent.

This is my last post on Instapundit – for now anyway. You are all invited to join me on my own blog, Michaeltotten.com, where I’ll keep an eye on the next four years of history.

Thanks, Glenn – thanks so much – for letting me, Megan, and Ann play on your lawn.

DON’T PACK YET: Disgruntled? Want to hide from the red staters in the Great White North? Canada says no.

REPEAL JANE’S LAW: My esteemed temporary Insta-colleague Megan McArdle goes by the handle “Jane Galt” on her blog. I first discovered her when she coined Jane’s Law.

Jane’s Law: The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane.

Now that we have a fresh start, of sorts, can we try to prove her wrong? She’s been right for as long as I’ve been paying attention to politics. But all things must someday come to an end.

TERRORIST DEATHWATCH: Yasser Arafat’s downward spiral continues.

LEFT-WING BLOGOSPHERE REACTIONS: John Kerry’s side of the blogosphere offers a diverse range of views of Bush’s victory.

Marc Cooper: Could there possibly have been an incumbent more easy to knock-off than George W. Bush? A real-life opposition party would have been insulted to be matched with a such an unworthy and frail rival. The Democrats, by contrast, got their lights punched out.

Tbogg: I look at the big map and all of the red in flyover country and I feel like I’ve been locked in a room with the slow learners.

Andrew Northrup: The national Democratic Party needs to shift to the right, culturally, in order to compete nationally. No choice. Wah wah wah, I’m going to go vote for Nader, wah wah. You should have voted this time.

Jeff Jarvis: Good for you, Kerry, for conceding. Thank you.

Daily Kos: [I]t’s clear the Democratic Party as currently constituted is on its deathbed. It needs reforms, and it needs them now. Quite frankly, the status quo simply won’t cut it. Howard Dean for DNC Chair.

Oliver Willis: We’re telling the world that we endorse the last four years, and give thumbs up to more evil. Sick.

Ezra Klein: I, like most of us, fell for the echo chamber. Daily Kos, MyDD, Steve Soto, Pandagon, and all the other blogs are run by good people with positive intentions, but if they’re you’re primary source for information, you’re outlook is perverted by an overwhelming amount of good news and a general disdain for the factual accuracy of bad news. It perverts your perspective and, because the sample group is so totally different than most of America, it begins to twist your political predictions and assumptions of what works…

Kevin Drum: MOST IMPORTANT EVENT….RECONSIDERED… I’ll plump for the Massachusett’s Supreme Court’s decision to legalize gay marriage. The result was nearly a dozen initiatives across the country to ban gay marriage and a perfect wedge issue for Republicans. For the second election in a row, it looks like the president was chosen by the courts.

Matthew Yglesias: With a majority of the popular vote and expanded margins in the House and Senate, we’re going to see Bush Unleashed — something that will probably be much crazier than what we’ve seen over the past four years.

Andrew Sullivan: George W. Bush is our president. He deserves a fresh start, a chance to prove himself again, and the constructive criticism of those of us who decided to back his opponent.

CATCH UP: Marcus Cicero says the Democrats need to own the war, for their good as well as for ours. And before they can do that they need to “get their heads out of the pot smoke of the Sixties and get serious.”

EXIT POLLS: So why were the exit polls wrong? Here’s a guess. Perhaps most of them were conducted in cities, not small towns and rural areas, skewing the results toward Kerry. Urban voters are more likely to be Democrats, after all. This is just a guess, though. As far as I know, media outlets haven’t published their exit poll methodologies.

NOW WHAT? Stephen Green looks at the next four years.

BUSH WINS OHIO. Says Fox. If true, he wins the election.

BUSH LEADS IN OHIO by five points. 70 percent of the vote has been counted. (Live results here.)

THE STATES TO WATCH: If Bush wins Ohio, New Mexico, and Colorado he will win the election with 271 electoral votes. (That’s assuming none of his other states flip to Kerry.) It’s trending that way now.