I heard on the news that Sen. Stevens "threatened to resign" if Alaska’s "bridge to nowhere" gets cut. I think "threatened to resign" is an unfair characterization of the Senator’s generous offer. I prefer to think of it as promising to resign. And I hope the Senate takes him up on it immediately.

(Sorry, no links. I just have a few minutes on someone else’s computer. Knoxville is lovely today, but they’re forecasting rain and cooler temps for the next few days. Doggone it.)

UPDATE: Welcome, Salon.com readers! Please take a look around while you’re here. Maybe something in the list to your left will intrigue you. Or click the blog title to go to my main page.

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Before they scroll off Site Meter’s 30-day graph, I thought I’d do a screen shot of what two Instalanches a few days apart do to the graph of a low-traffic blog such as this:

Pretty dramatic, huh? Glenn, you’re a frighteningly powerful man. BTW, did I remember to say thanks?

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Story in Six Meat Buffet about k-ville white trash punks who pulled drive-by shooting and may get off with probation:

"WTW: Tennessee Justice"
http://www.sixmeatbuffet.com/index.php 

Lots of other posts to inspire at the Carnival of the Vanities:
http://schweitn.blogspot.com/2005/10/carnival-of-vanities-birthday-edition.html 

TLF points to Citizens Against Gov’t Waste report on Real ID act — it’s not just anti-privacy, it’s expensive:
http://www.techliberation.com/ 

Wienerville: Hog on Ice — I think I read that some time ago but forgot about it. Bert makes good points.
http://wienerville.blogspot.com/

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Thursday morning, I’m flying back to Knoxville, TN, for a 5-day visit. I’ll be spending time with my dad, who’s 90, and his new wife Dorothy (they married this past summer and honeymooned in Colorado), my sister Linda and her husband Alan, and some very old and dear friends dating back to my college days at UT, especially Albert and Walter. Albert has promised the party to end all parties at the family farm in Concord.

I won’t have a laptop, so blogging will be light (of course, as critics note, my blogging is often light). But I’ll try to bum some computer time from various people to check my mail and post something whenever I can. I’ve got a few little posts half-way done and on hold. And I’m going to make Albert help me with a post about his family’s farm that should be interesting. I’ll have a digital camera, so party pictures may be included.

I’ve nagged Glenn Reynolds a couple of times about his lack of UT campus photoblogging. I thought about bugging him in person, but I suspect he’s a busy man these days. Instead, if the weather cooperates, I’ll get some campus photos of my own. So there, Glenn!

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Nearly a month after I contacted Colorado’s senators and representatives regarding the six projects I identified for PorkBusters, I’ve finally received my second response. This one’s from Rep. Mark Udall of the 2nd Congressional District (which includes the People’s Republic of Boulder), and it’s certainly a big improvement over the utterly non-responsive piece of crap I got from Sen. Salazar.

Udall actually echoed back to me part of what I said and addressed it. So this is at least a better-targeted form letter. (In fact, I hope that it’s a form letter — that means a congresscritter in Colorado’s most liberal district got so many requests to cut highway pork that his staff created a letter specifically for that topic.)

Udall didn’t specifically address the projects I asked about, of course, and he dismissed the idea of rejecting all earmarks. Instead, he described a bill he’s introduced that’s mildly interesting. Here’s his letter in full:

Dear Mr. Combs:

Thank you for letting me know you support canceling some parts of the recently-passed transportation policy act to offset costs of responding to the recent hurricanes. I appreciate your getting in touch.

Even before the hurricanes, the budget was in deep deficit from budget policies defying the laws of fiscal gravity. Now, the president has said other spending should be cut to help pay for rebuilding the Gulf Coast. I don’t know what cuts will be proposed, but it’s clearly time for a serious debate, and to jump-start it, I’ve introduced H. R. 3966, the Simulating Leadership In Cutting Expenditures (or "SLICE") Act.

Currently, Congress can ignore a presidential proposal to cancel specific spending. Under my bill, there would be a vote, up or down, on each presidential proposal to cut something from the transportation bill.

Some oppose all spending "earmarks" proposed by Members of Congress. I don’t. I think we know our communities’ needs and should use our judgment on spending tax dollars. So, I have sought earmarks for Colorado and will do so again. But some earmarks might not be approved if Congress had to vote on them separately. That’s where "SLICE" comes in. It’s a workable and constitutional alternative to the line-item veto, to further Presidential leadership and Congressional accountability. I will work for its enactment. And in the meantime, if the House of Representatives considers canceling spending for specific transportation projects, I will remember your views.

Thanks again for contacting me. I see my job as more than voting on legislation. I also want to try to bridge divides and bring people together to solve problems. So, I welcome your letters and e-mails and always listen closely to what you and other Coloradans have to say. For more information, visit my web site at http://markudall.house.gov/HoR/CO02/home.htm and sign up for my e-mail newsletters.

I have to wonder if the bill name is a typo. Did he really mean "Simulating Leadership" or is it supposed to be "Stimulating Leadership"? As for the idea — well, it’s a sorry second to a line-item veto, but I suppose it could actually help. It’s hard to say. If the President proposed cuts, would Congress think twice about voting to reject them, or would these votes just become a pro forma exercise?

For that matter, the Prez has never vetoed a spending bill — how many line-item cuts would he propose?

In any case, Udall gets props for being responsive (and I’m not even a constituent) and for actually coming up with a substantive and perhaps even useful proposal.

He loses a letter grade for passivity, lack of leadership, and unwillingness to commit regarding specific, real cuts: he’s waiting to see what the Prez proposes, and if the House (not him, someone else) considers cuts, he’ll remember my views. Yeah, whatever.

I give him a C+. Better than Salazar’s F. The rest are Incompletes. Or unexcused absences?

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! While you’re here, please take a look around. Maybe Better rubber through biotech will grab you. If politics interest you, take a look at  Condi in Central Asia or The one thing Bush gets right. Or see if any of the titles listed on the left look intriguing. I appreciate you stopping by. And if you haven’t done so yet, go see Serenity!

UPDATE 2: According to Udall’s website, H.R. 3966 was introduced by Udall, Steve Chabot (R-OH), Jeff Flake (R-AZ), and Marilyn Musgrave (R-CO). I suppose it’s nice that he’s reaching across party lines, but isn’t the letter a bit misleading, suggesting that this is solely his project? I was right about the typo — it is "Stimulating Leadership." 

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This week’s Carnival of Liberty is up at Searchlight Crusade, and it looks like Dan Melson has put together a good one. I really don’t have time to read anything until this evening, but it took willpower not to click on some of the entries. If you’ve got some free time, go ahead — start reading!

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The problem of spam blogs (or splogs, to those determined to conserve syllables) seems to have finally reached a critical mass where so many people are screaming about it that something must be done. They’re beginning to seriously reduce the usefulness of the blogosphere. So, what’s a spam blog? Kailash Nadh wrote a pretty good definition:

What is a spam blog?
A blog that is created with the sole purpose of reaping ad revenues and capturing search engine results can be called a spam blog. In most of the cases, a spam blog is created/run and maintained by an automated program, which we commonly call ‘bots’. Some spam blogs disguise so well that you sometimes end up reading it for hours!

How a spam blog works?
As I said, a spam blog is created (usually) by a bot. For the time being, consider the term ‘Mortgage refinance’. A spam blog’s primary objective being getting search traffic, it’s domain name would be something like this mortgage-refinance-info.com or mortgage-refinance.some_blog_host.com. To keep itself alive, it’ll crawl directories, search engines, rss feeds etc.. and collect information on ‘Mortgage refinance’ thus preparing a neat collection of information. The mext thing obviously, is posting this info regularly. I have seen blogs listing live news feeds related to a certain subject (via XML feeds obtained from the news publishers). …

If you want to see why these things are a problem, just take a look at BlogRolling’s recently updated blogs list. It wasn’t that long ago that the list of 1000 most recently updated blogs spanned a 15-minute or longer period and contained many blogs you’d recognize. Now, the list covers barely a minute (and is typically running 10-15 minutes behind), and spam blogs make up the overwhelming majority of the entries. As a consequence, BlogRolling has had major problems the past few days. I think it logged only one of my last half-dozen pings. Other services are having similar problems, and Fight Splog! reported that IceRocket has stopped indexing blogspot.com (that is, Blogger) blogs until Google (which owns Blogger) cleans up the place.

Some of these bot-generated spam blogs are pretty sophisticated. They harvest content from legitimate sites and present it in a way that can fool you into thinking they’re real blogs. Recently, Doc Searls, who’s not exactly a naive newbie, apologized for mistakenly linking to a post on what he later discovered was a spam blog. The post had simply been stolen from Dave Winer’s RSS blog.

Mostly, spam blogs are just another scam for generating revenue directly (via ads or clickthroughs) or indirectly (by "gaming" searches and page ranks). But Tim Bray said someone suggested to him that they’d be a good vehicle for delivering malware to unsuspecting, unprotected visitors. In any case, they’re significantly clogging up the Internet and making tools/services such as BlogRolling, Technorati, etc., much less useful. Bray is correct, I suspect:

This week’s splogstorm and the endless flood of email spam are two symptoms of the same disease. When you allow people to add content to the Net for free, the economic incentives to fill all the available space with with spam are irresistible, and fighting back is difficult, maybe impossible. This works because, while the payoff per unit of spam is low, the cost is zero. …

Unfortunately, Bray’s proposed solution sucks. He wants us to use "Internet Stamps" sold by government post offices for a penny to identify our emails, blog posts, etc. The stamps merely identify your post or message as something someone paid a penny for. He argues that the cost would be small for legitimate users, but prohibitive for spammers, either email or blog.

I’m holding out for a better solution — one that doesn’t involve the post office, a new revenue source for government, and a new bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, here’s hoping all the complaining will force Google (and other free blog hosting services) to put authentication measures in place that will stop automated blog creation.

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There’s a rare opportunity for bloggers this week: The Watcher of Weasels has an opening on the Watcher’s Council. If you’re interested in nominating yourself or someone else, see this post for details and be sure to read the rules (BTW, I’m recommending Eric Cowperthwaite of Eric’s Grumbles).

Each week, the Watcher’s Council members nominate one of their own blog posts plus a non-member blog post as one of the best on the Web. The council then votes on these nominees, and the Watcher posts the winners on Friday. They’re usually well worth checking out. The most recent winning council post is from Wallo World, and Waiter Rant had the winning non-council post. Eric’s Continuing to Correspond with Senator Boxer ranked fourth in non-council posts.

For more fine posts, see the Council’s voting results and the complete list of nominees.

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Michael Yon has returned to Iraq and is now embedded with U.S. troops in Baghdad. His first dispatch tells the story of his journey back and discusses why there are few reporters on the ground in Iraq. After reading it, you’ll probably be somewhat more sympathetic toward the MSM journalists covering the war. Somewhat.

I’ve blogged about Yon’s dispatches before, saying of his previous embed:

Michael Yon is in Iraq at his own expense as an independent war correspondent. Yon is embedded with the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment — "Deuce Four" — and writes about its missions in Mosul. You can read his dispatches at his blog. In fact, I can’t urge you strongly enough to do so. This is war journalism as it ought to be done. And as no one else is doing it.

This latest dispatch is long, but as before, compelling and fascinating. You really should read it. In fact, if you haven’t read Yon’s earlier stuff, read his Open Forum post, Thank You for Your Support, in which he explains — and illustrates with remarkable photographs — why he’s reporting on this war. It’s a marvelous and moving piece of work. Then, just bookmark Michael Yon: Online Magazine, drop by when you can, and read the previous dispatches.

Also, please click his "Support the Next Dispatch" button and kick in a few bucks to help him pay the bills. As he details in the latest dispatch, covering the war in Iraq is an expensive proposition.

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Thanks to Mr. Completely for pointing to Sgt. Ron Long’s account of the "staged interview" between Pres. Bush and some U.S. troops in Iraq that the MSM have been making such a fuss about. Sgt. Long — an Army Combat Medic who blogs at They Call Us, "Doc" — was one of the soldiers interviewed by Bush. He rejected the media characterization of the event as "staged" or "scripted" (emphasis in original):

First of all, we were told that we would be speaking with the President of the United States, our Commander-in-Chief, President Bush, so I believe that it would have been totally irresponsible for us NOT to prepare some ideas, facts or comments that we wanted to share with the President.

We were given an idea as to what topics he may discuss with us, but it’s the President of the United States; He will choose which way his conversation with us may go.

We practiced passing the microphone around to one another, so we wouldn’t choke someone on live TV. We had an idea as to who we thought should answer what types of questions, unless President Bush called on one of us specifically.

Sgt. Long, who’s been in Iraq almost a year, doesn’t think much of the media and their coverage of this event or the war in general:

… It makes my stomach ache to think that we are helping to preserve free speech in the US, while the media uses that freedom to try to RIP DOWN the President and our morale, as US Soldiers. They seem to be enjoying the fact that they are tearing the country apart. Worthless!

The question I was most asked while I was home on leave in June was, "So…What’s REALLY going on over there?" Does that not tell you something?! Who has confidence in the media to tell the WHOLE STORY? It’s like they WANT this to turn into another Vietnam. I hate to break it to them, but it’s not.

Read the whole thing, and read his follow-up quoting some of the emails he’s received in response. BTW, I noticed from one of the emails that Instapundit linked to Sgt. Long’s post, too, but I must have missed it. Sorry, Glenn, I didn’t mean to send the surge of traffic my links generate just to Mr. Completely and not to you.

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If you have even a passing interest in anything related to firearms — 2nd Amendment issues, self-defense matters, pretty pictures of guns and of people shooting, advice on buying or cleaning weapons, etc. — you should drop by this week’s Carnival of Cordite, hosted as usual by Gullyborg at Resistance is Futile!

As usual, there are interesting posts across a broad spectrum of issues — from serious intellectual discussion to "Cool! Things blowing up!" pictures. Gullyborg provides fine introductions that just suck you into clicking the links, sprinkled with lots of pictures. When Gullyborg says "don’t be this guy" — well, you just have to click that link and check out the video clip.  Enjoy!

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I think this is pretty cool: Scientists in Australia have created a synthetic version of the rubbery protein, resilin, that gives fleas their jumping ability and enables insects’ wings to flex hundreds of millions of times without losing elasticity. They began, acccording to news@nature.com, with an educated guess:

Although the gene that generates resilin in fruitflies had already been tentatively identified by other researchers, the precise code for making resilin was not known. So the Australian scientists picked out a small section of DNA at the end of the gene that contained lots of repeating sections of code, hoping that it would make resilin.

They reasoned that as elastic proteins in nature are often made of repeating sequences of amino acids, the genes responsible for constructing them must also be repetitive. "It was a bit of a guess," admits Elvin.

They inserted this portion of fruit fly gene into E. coli bacteria. The bacteria multiplied like, well, bacteria and produced a resilin precurser protein. Somehow, the researchers figured out just what to do with this liquid:

The researchers then mixed pro-resilin with a ruthenium catalyst under a light, which knitted together units of the amino acid tyrosine within the molecules. After just 20 seconds the liquid mixture turned into a rubbery solid that behaved exactly like resilin itself, they report in this week’s Nature.

The reaction worked on the very first attempt, recalls Elvin. "I remember running around the lab that day showing it to everybody, saying ‘Here, feel this!’," he laughs.

One of the first applications to be studied is artificial spinal discs, which are currently made with polythene plastic. Resilin’s ability to flex without losing elasticity may lead to significantly improved artificial discs.

The team, which works for CSIRO Livestock Industries in St Lucia, Australia, is hoping to improve the synthetic resilin further with another genetic modification:

The group is also trying to add a gene that makes spider silk to the modified E. coli, so that the rubber it produces is stronger than resilin itself while being just as stretchy. "People have been trying to do similar things with spider silk for a while," says Lakes, "and I think this approach could bear fruit."

Of course, the luddites will scream "Frankenrubber!" and fret about the dangers of E. coli that can bounce, but I think this kind of biotech invention is terrific, and I’m delighted to see that it comes from a private company, not a government lab or university. 

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Head over to Gateway Pundit for details of Condi’s trip through Central Asia that you’re not going to see on the nightly news. A trip on which she pushed openly for democracy and liberty in one authoritarian former Soviet republic after another. Here’s a taste:

After Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made stops in Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and later to Tajikistan, she was not about to put up with any silliness from the Ex-Soviet Autocratic President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, on Thursday!

After their opening remarks, the Kazakh Leader left his podium. That is when Condi chased him down and brought him back to the podium to answer reporter’s questions!

From the Q&A transcript and other stories cited, it sounds like Condi has been doing a masterful job of being charming, yet challenging and politely confrontational to her ex-Soviet autocrat hosts. She spoke clearly and directly about freedom with Nazarbayev uncomfortably at her side:

SECRETARY RICE: Andrea, I think if we were interested only in oil and the war on terrorism we would not be speaking in the way that we are about democracy here or in Saudi Arabia or throughout the Middle East.

And so quite clearly, while we do have interests in terms of resources and in terms of the struggle for terrorism, we have in no way allowed those interests to get in the way of our open and clear defense of freedom.

But she promoted freedom and democracy from a perspective of realism:

"Central Asia is a region that has not had a democratic past," Rice said after a meeting with Tajikistan’s authoritarian president, Imomali Rakhmonov. Like Nazarbayev, he is a wily veteran of the old Soviet hierarchy.

…

"The important issue is to take these countries where they are and see them make progress," Rice said.

I’ve expressed my admiration for Condi before in a post about her remarkable speech at American University in Cairo, one of the finest speeches I’ve ever read, and in a post about her strong commitment to the Second Amendment. If she were persuaded to run for President — Dick Morris has made it his mission, and there are multiple movements and groups to draft her — I’d be inclined to support her enthusiastically.

I don’t know anything about her thinking on economic and fiscal issues. But on fiscal matters, who could be worse than the current President? Well, virtually any Democrat, I suppose…

On social issues, I’m hopeful. Condi described herself as "mildly pro-choice," meaning, according to Morris (emphasis added), that "she opposes abortion but worries about government action to prevent it." Now, that suggests a state of mind and general approach to issues that warms the cockles of this libertarian’s heart. I like the idea of a president who worries about government action even to achieve a goal she desires.

Plus, she looks hot in a long black coat and boots.

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I’m about fed up with Firefox, so allow me to vent about one particularly frustrating problem I’ve had for a couple of months now. In fact, I posted much of this in the support forum in August. I revisited there today, and the situation hasn’t changed much — more users with the same problem, more arrogant, condescending, and defensive non-answers from the "experts" who blame the stupid users, the stupid sites, everyone and everything but Firefox. The problem is that you point Firefox to a site and wait for it to load, and you get this error message:

Redirection limit for this URL exceeded. Unable to load the requested page. This may be caused by cookies that are blocked.

If you search the Firefox knowledge base for "redirection limit," there are no matches. But if you search the support forums, you’ll find over a hundred threads, most of them containing a dozen or more messages. After you’ve read a few of them, you’ll feel like you’re in Groundhog Day. The "experts" endlessly repeat all the same crap — change the redirection limit in about:config, allow cookies, delete cookies, clear your cache, rub your belly, pat your head, and chant "om mane padme hum."

In virtually every instance I’ve read, the poor sap with the problem tries the proferred solutions and none of them help.

The "experts" then inevitably fall back on "it’s a problem with the site, they’ve coded the page wrong so there’s an endless redirect loop; FF is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do." When someone dares to say "it works in IE," the "experts" say the site must be serving different pages to FF and IE.

B.S.

If the site is serving a different page to FF, why doesn’t spoofing as IE6 solve the problem? Why does the page served to IE6 (and which IE6 has no problem displaying) produce the same redirection limit error? If there’s an endless loop or other problem with the page code, why does the page initially load correctly in FF and then one day stop (with no config or other change)? Or load correctly in FF on one PC, but not another?

So, I’m not convinced that the problem is "poor coding" — if the page for FF has a redirect loop, the problem should occur at all times for all installations of FF, and that’s not the case.

But even if it is "poor coding," so what? Maybe  the way FF handles these allegedly "wrongly coded" pages is "correct" and "standards-compliant," but I don’t care. I want it to show me the page I’m trying to get to, not frustrate me in some anal-retentive quest to punish sites that don’t meet its uncompromising standards.

FF is supposed to serve the needs of its users, not punish poor coding of websites. At a minimum, if it can’t resolve the problem posed by the alleged poor coding, it should at least offer a more meaningful error message and/or propose a workaround. I don’t believe that the problem can’t be resolved — if you can identify the "poor coding" that allegedly causes the loop, then you can handle it in a way that doesn’t punish the user. I suspect the "community" simply doesn’t want FF to do something it’s "not supposed to do" and thinks people shouldn’t visit sites that aren’t coded the way they’re "supposed to be."

I’m not the W3C, I’m a user. If you’re creating software that you want me to use, then my needs had damn well better be more important than the W3C’s frickin’ standards. I’m tired of running two browsers and pasting URLs from one to the other when a page fails to come up. The hassle is beginning to outweigh the advantages.

IE7 is in beta, and it’s reported to have tabs, be fast, have better security, and fix all (or most) of the rendering and CSS positioning bugs in IE6. Guess which browser I’m likely to settle on?

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In Delaware, at least, anonymous political speech is still protected:

DOVER, Del. – The Delaware Supreme Court rejected a town councilman’s quest to find out who posted obscenity-laden tirades about him on the Internet, saying free speech concerns outweighed the politician’s argument that he was defamed.

The decision Wednesday reversed a lower court ruling ordering an Internet service provider to disclose the identity of four anonymous posters to a blog site operated by Independent Newspapers Inc., publisher of the Delaware State News.

The posted entries, among other things, accused Smyrna councilman Patrick Cahill of “obvious mental deterioration” and used the name “Gahill” to suggest that he is homosexual.

In June, the lower court ruled that Cahill had established a “good faith basis” for contending that he and his wife were victims of defamation, and it affirmed a previous order for Comcast Cable Communications to disclose the bloggers’ identities.

But Chief Justice Myron Steele likened anonymous Internet speech to anonymous political pamphleteering, a practice the U.S. Supreme Court characterized in 1995 as “an honorable tradition of advocacy and dissent.”

An honorable tradition that the Supreme Court unfortunately forgot about when it was considering the implications of McCain-Feingold.

Chief Justice Steele understands that — unlike the old media — blogs and the Internet have a built-in, free, and nearly instantaneous feedback mechanism:

Steele also noted that plaintiffs in such cases can use the Internet to respond to character attacks and “generally set the record straight,” and that, as in Cahill’s case, blogs and chatrooms tend to be vehicles for people to express opinions, not facts.

It’s intellectually fashionable these days to conflate facts with opinions and beliefs, so Steele also noted that there is a distinction between a statement of fact and an opinion, and we’re entitled to whatever opinions we choose:

“Given the context, no reasonable person could have interpreted these statements as being anything other than opinion. … The statements are, therefore, incapable of a defamatory meaning,” he wrote.

Professor Bainbridge has some cogent comments, good excerpts from the decision, and a PDF of the decision itself available for download. It’s worth reading if you’re interested in such matters. Justice Steele recognized that defamation suits against anonymous critics are often brought merely to unmask the critic, a tactic intended to intimidate and silence criticism. To prevent this chilling of speech and discouragement of debate, Bainbridge notes, the majority set a high burden for plaintiffs:

The court finally decided that “before a defamation plaintiff can obtain the identity of an anonymous defendant through the compulsory discovery process he must support his defamation claim with facts sufficient to defeat a summary judgment motion.” In other words, the plaintiff “must submit sufficient evidence to establish a prima facie case for each essential element of the claim in question” before being allowed to discover the identity of the blogger in question. In the case of public political figures, the burden of surviving a summary judgment motion in defamation cases is so stringent that public figures are highly unlikely to be able to unmask their anonymous critics.

As far as I can tell, this is a major win for bloggers and the First Amendment.

The ruling affects only Delaware, of course. And this is the first time a state supreme court has ruled to protect the anonymity of bloggers. But it’s nevertheless very important. At some point, various state and federal campaign finance laws will be used to attempt to crush the rights of anonymous political speech and of expressing one’s opinions freely. It’s likely that bloggers and new media will be in the center of that conflict. And the points made in this ruling are likely to be cited by the defenders of free speech.

Therefore, I’m surprised at how little attention this got last week (the ruling was Oct. 5). I missed Bainbridge’s post (haven’t dropped by his place in a while). A Google Blog search didn’t turn up any other "big name" blogs commenting on this ruling. Of course, Instapundit could have done one of his "This is good news" posts — but who has time to click every single one of those?

A tip o’ the hat to VRB, whose email drew it to my attention.

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