Andrew Sullivan momentarily paused in his perenniel campaign of demanding kinder treatment for cuththroats to second the leftwing blogosphere’s posterboy of prolixity, Glenn Greenwald, in attacking the amiable Glenn Reynolds.

According to Andrew Sullivan, Reynolds is guilty, forsooth, “of never challeng(ing) in any serious way the abuses of power in this administration nor the extremism of the Malkinesque blogosphere.”

Those who haven’t been drinking moonbat koolaid don’t actually believe this administration is guilty of abuses of power at all. Really, if anything, it is guilty of neglecting to prosecute and punish war-time sedition and treason.

And face it, Andrew, anyone still really libertarian is on the right, and not on the San Francisco-style left. A commitment to socialism at home and surrender overseas, even seasoned with debauchery, is not libertarianism, old boy. Barry Goldwater was right: There’s nothing wrong with extremism in defense of liberty. Those of us still libertarian, still on the right, respect and admire Michelle Malkin precisely because she is a fighter. In fact, as a symbolic rejoinder on this subject, I’m going to add this little item to my links collection today.

I can understand, of course, how Michelle Malkin would scare someone like you.

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Turning to that odious windbag Greenwald, aptly recognized by Charles Johnson as “the left’s most dishonest blogger” (a title not easily achieved):

On Tuesday, Greenwald indulged in a little gamesmanship, first pooh-pooh’ing the significance of last weekend’s ravings in Jeff Goldstein‘s Comment section by deranged (then University of Arizona Psychology Instructor) Deborah Frisch (who subsequently resigned), and then proceeding to claim rhetorically the moral high ground in order to equate an obvious exasperated rant by Mischa of Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler with Dr. Frisch’s sinister and highly disturbing comments, applying imagined violence and sexual acts to Mr. Goldstein’s children.

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Mischa’s rant:

So keep that in mind. Should we ever make the mistake of capturing any of the perpetrators of the war crime against PFCs Menchaca and Tucker alive, we can forget about interrogating them in order to catch the rest, according to the Supreme Whores. Well, unless they’re willing to give up information if we ask “pretty please?”, since anything other than that has been deemed illegal by those blackrobed tyrants. Are we exaggerating? Try doing anything to those mutilating darlings of the Supremes in order to extract life-saving intel from them, and then wait for the Supreme Whores to decide that you were “humiliating” them in doing so.

Five ropes, five robes, five trees.

Some assembly required.

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Personally, I have a lot more of a problem with the name-calling language “Supreme Whores,” than I do with the “five ropes, five trees… Some assembly required” rhetorical flourish at the end.

OK, Mischa’s posting is not an example of closely-reasoned and totally exemplary blogging, but the current debates over public issues and policy are often emotionally charged, and we all blog unevenly. Many bloggers occasionally descend to the literary form of the rant. But, frankly, the most lurid right wing rant has a tendency to resemble an example of the most dignified and restrained expressions of partisanship found on many of the left’s best known blogs. Mischa would have to chug down a lot of tequila shots, and be in a really bad mood, to come even close to Digby or Atrios on an average day.

Greenwald’s alleged outrage over Mischa’s post is just like the faux-pious nonsense from leftwing moonbats filling up my own Comments section over the Hadji Girl song: just a bunch of opportunistic righteous posturing, the left’s favorite form of self-gratification.

There is a great deal of difference between the downright spooky comments involving his kids that Jeff Goldstein was receiving over the weekend, ultimately accompanied by some very real Denial of Service attacks, and Mischa’s crack. The Supreme Court was not put out of action for a few days, and Justice Stevens didn’t lose any sleep wondering if Mischa was really serious about that tree and that rope.

Former Ambassador Wilson and wife never got what they wanted for Fitzmas, so what can they do but sue?

I never knew that there was a Constitutional right to immunity from rebuttal, but Joe Wilson says his was violated.

Florida Crime rates have fallen to the lowest level in three decades, reports the St Petersburg Times:

The state’s serious crime rate fell to the lowest level in three decades last year, a development Gov. Jeb Bush hailed Tuesday as validation for his policies on gun control and criminal justice.

Bush credited tougher penalties as one reason for the lower crime rate. He also said the figures show that controlling human behavior, not guns, is the way to reduce crime.

“I think law-abiding citizens who have guns for protection are actually part of the reason we have a lower crime rate,” Bush said at a press conference in the Capitol. “I don’t think that there’s a lot of data that suggests that gun control reduces crime.”

Florida licenses to carry concealed handguns are easy to obtain, and Florida recently passed legislation abolishing a legal requirement in liberal states that obliges the law-abiding citizen to make every possible effort to retreat before defending himself when confronted by an attacker.

Meanwhile in Washington, DC, where even ownership of handguns is prohibited, the July Homicide total has risen to 14 (in 13 days), and the chief of police has declared a crime emergency.

D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey reacted yesterday to a recent surge in homicides by declaring a “crime emergency,” a move that gives him the freedom to quickly adjust officers’ schedules and restrict their days off.

The victims included a popular store owner slain at closing time, a community activist killed in a park and a British citizen whose throat was slit in Georgetown.

The most recent to die was 23-year-old Michael Dorsey, of Capitol Heights. He was found shot in the chest just after 2 a.m. this morning, in the hallway of an apartment building of Gallaudet St. NE. Three other people were also shot in the city overnight, but were expected to live, police said…

Eleven men, two women and a 16-year-old youth have been killed in the city since July 1. About 25 hours before Dorsey was killed, Laquanda Johnson, 24, was found fatally shot in the 3600 block of 22nd Street SE. A suspect was arrested yesterday afternoon in Suitland.

Despite the recent uptick in violence, the 95 homicides recorded in the city so far this year is only one more than the total committed by this date in 2005. But the number of robberies is up 14 percent, and Ramsey and other commanders are concerned that more holdups will turn deadly.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry says that Hezbollah is trying to move the Israeli soldiers captured on Wednesday to Iran.

Jerusalem Post

A celebration of the burkha at Time Magazine.

Kos made FoxNews.com yesterday, with Noel Shepherd wondering: Is the Daily Kos About to Implode?

It appears that the post-Yearly Kos month from hell is continuing for Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the proprietor of the Internet’s premier liberal blog Daily Kos. After receiving some extremely negative press from major publications such as The New York Times, The New Republic and Newsweek immediately following his seemingly successful bloggers’ convention in Las Vegas, Kos is now faced with an even greater challenge: dissension within his ranks.

Such internal squabbling comes at the same time that many prominent Democrats seem to be privately expressing concern about the direction the “netroots” — the self-described Internet grassroots movement of liberal bloggers and their loyal followers — are taking the Party. This seemingly inconvenient planetary alignment is not only threatening the long-term viability of this crusade, but also is putting Kos in an uncomfortable position just as his notoriety is skyrocketing.

As reported here on June 30, revelations about Kos’s friend and former business partner Jerome Armstrong — from stock fraud allegations to accepting consulting fees from not so liberal candidates — have cast a cloud over the blog and its leader. This pall has also undermined the stellar relationship Kos has had with the traditional media up to this point.

Yet, maybe more important, these revelations — along with the way Markos and his Kossacks reacted to them — have caused some prominent DKos bloggers to question the behavior of Zuniga and his devotees. Such a civil war within the liberal blogosphere certainly has the potential to further discredit it, while likely making the mainstream media as well as the candidates they revere less apt to associate with this developing train wreck.

Some prominent bloggers on the left have even begun to criticize Kos. Last Saturday, KosKid Maryscott O’Connor, in a posting titled Something is Rotten in Blogmark, condemned the customary Partyline mentality which flourishes on Daily Kos:

Sometimes I am embarrassed to call myself a member of DKos.

This is one of those times.

There is a sort of groupthink, Lord of the Flies kind of behaviour at DKos over certain issues that absolutely makes me nauseated…

Increasingly, I have begun to feel intimidated or wary about writing my thoughts and doubts about these issues, lest I be set upon by a pack of Defenders of the Kos. It is this sense of intimidation that spurs me to write this, among other reasons: when I start censoring myself because I’m afraid I’ll be punished with disapproval, anyone’s disapproval, I know I’m allowing others’ opinions to matter too much to me. I shouldn’t be deciding what to say and not to say online based on any anticipated reaction.

And predicted that not even the left blogosphere’s chorus of howler-monkeys can ultimately succeed in shouting down questions about the exchange of the Kos’ influence for cash. The Kosola scandal “WILL NOT GO AWAY simply because some people don’t think Markos should be held to the standards that he WILL, ultimately, BE held to.”

But many on the left, like Steve Gilliard, think lefties should

“Say nothing bad about Commander Kos.”

They’re scurrying to the barricades over on DailyKos today, posting defensively about the media’s “obsession with trying to bring down the progressive netroots.”

We all knew that Woodstock, New York and Berkeley, California have a demented moonbat problem, but Rolla, Missouri?

A local editorialist there named Dave Weinbaum is afraid that Bush is going to run again.

Yes, I know the 22nd Amendment limits presidents to two terms, but Mr. Weinbaum has figured out a loophole.

Bush has finally done it.

He now acknowledges that Karl Rove stole two presidential elections in collusion with Diebold Corporation and the Supreme Court. He’s so repentant that he has decided to run once more for the presidency…legitimately.

You see, if he was never legally elected, term limits don’t apply to him.

Since he claims no knowledge of the actual crimes committed by Karl, learning of them after the fact, there’s no likelihood that he’ll be indicted, much less impeached. Republicans, if they maintain their control, can stop all Lib attempts at such feeble gestures…

The only way Dems can stop this from happening is to win the majority in Congress…or bribe enough Republicans to vote against the President.

And I thought the strongest US pot was grown up in Humboldt County….

Paleontologists excavating in the Riversleigh Fossil Beds (also) in Northern Australia have made some exciting finds:

Palaeontologists digging in northern Australia claim to have found the fossilised remains of the ultimate fighting marsupial – a flesh eating “killer kangaroo” that had wolf-like fangs and once walked the earth more than 10 million years ago.

The team from the University of New South Wales made the discovery along with 20 other previously unknown species in northern Queensland, including the carnivorous kangaroo, known as Ekaltadeta, and a large predatory bird described by the team as a “demon duck of doom”.

The vertebrate palaeontologist Sue Hand said the meat-eaters would have looked remarkably different from kangaroos around today. “These things had slicing crests that could have crunched through bone and sliced off flesh,” she said.

Professor Michael Archer, another team member, described the remains of two kangaroo species, one with wolf-like fangs and another with long forearms that was unable to hop like a modern kangaroo. “Because they didn’t hop, these were galloping kangaroos, with big, powerful forelimbs. Some of them had long canines like wolves,” he said.

The killer marsupial and duck of doom flourished in the Miocene epoch.

At American Thinker, essential commentator on the Pouting Spooks Anti-Bush Operation, Clarice Feldman, offers her latest observations on Robert Novak’s account of his role in the Plamegame scandal, published yesterday in Human Events.

Novak writes:

For nearly the entire time of his investigation, Fitzgerald knew—independent of me—the identity of the sources I used in my column of July 14, 2003. A federal investigation was triggered when I reported that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was employed by the CIA and helped initiate his 2002 mission to Niger. That Fitzgerald did not indict any of these sources may indicate his conclusion that none of them violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

Causing Feldman to ask:

If Fitzgerald knew by January 12, 2004 who the leaker was and that it wasn’t Libby or Rove, why did he later call them to testify before the grand jury? Was it simply to determine whether he could trap them into making perjurious statements, something the law does not permit?

She believes, along with many others, that Novak’s unnamed source “is almost certainly Richard Armitage, Colin Powell’s Deputy Secretary of State. The same man who almost certainly was Bob Woodward’s source as well.”

Feldman makes an important connection:

If Fitzgerald has known since January 12, 2004 of the name of the leaker, why is he still protecting him, and why is he treating the leaker’s (that is, Armitage’s) source, who is almost certainly Marc Grossman, former Under Secretary of State for political affairs, the man reportedly the source for the first accusations against Libby and Rove, as an impartial witness to the events? In the discovery process it turned out that Grossman was a longtime friend of Wilson’s, dating to their college days at the University of California—Santa Barbara. Is it likely that the famous prosecutor missed this fact?

and then asks another question:

Finally (and I hope to report more fully on this soon) what role, exactly, did former Deputy Attorney General Comey, who set up this extra-statutory (and I think unconstitutional) appointment of his friend Patrick Fitzgerald, play in steering Fitzgerald toward the mistaken notion that Libby was lying, not Wilson or the CIA?

Our own Comey Connection report here.

From Wuzzadem.

Hat tip to Beth.

Marc Gunther, reviewing Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail in Fortune, deplores “the extinction of mass culture.” Some of us consider it cause for celebration.

Anderson rejoices in the proliferation of niche markets and consumer choice, but Gunther argues that “The advent of 300 channels and the Internet has fragmented audiences – and the explosion of choice has left us poorer.”

I think the explosion of choice has left us poorer in at least two arenas. The first is journalism. (Yes, as a Fortune writer, I’ve got a stake in the health of the mainstream media, which bloggers call the MSM.) The network evening newscasts, big-city newspapers and the national news magazines once had the money, access, skills, commitment and power to deliver lots of original reporting and put important issues on the national agenda. Today, they are all diminished.

To pick a single, timely, example, The Tribune Co. announced just the other day that its newspapers would be closing foreign bureaus in Johannesburg, Moscow, Lebanon and Pakistan. This is happening all over newspaperdom and it happened years ago at the broadcast networks.

Yes, there is more information available to us than ever, but I don’t think we are better informed. Niche media will, inevitably, continue to weaken mass media.

The second arena where we are worse off is politics. This is related to journalism, as the moderate and responsible (okay, bland) voices of the MSM get drowned out by partisan, opinionated cableheads and bloggers.

Yeah, right, I’m really depressed about how responsible (but, unfortunately, lying) voices like Dan Rather’s were drowned out by (fact-checking) Charles Johnson and Powerline.

A complete list of things caused by global warming

Air pressure changes, allergies increase, Alps melting, anxiety, aggressive polar bears, algal blooms, Asthma, avalanches, billions of deaths, blackbirds stop singing, blizzards, blue mussels return, boredom, budget increases, building season extension, bushfires, business opportunities, business risks, butterflies move north, cannibalistic polar bears, cardiac arrest, Cholera, civil unrest, cloud increase, cloud stripping, methane emissions from plants, cold spells (Australia), computer models, conferences, coral bleaching, coral reefs grow, coral reefs shrink, cold spells, crumbling roads, buildings and sewage systems, damages equivalent to $200 billion, Dengue hemorrhagic fever, dermatitis, desert advance, desert life threatened, desert retreat, destruction of the environment, diarrhoea, disappearance of coastal cities, disaster for wine industry (US), Dolomites collapse, drought, drowning people, drowning polar bears, ducks and geese decline, dust bowl in the corn belt, early spring, earlier pollen season, earthquakes, Earth light dimming, Earth slowing down, Earth spinning out of control, Earth wobbling, El Niño intensification, erosion, emerging infections, encephalitis,, Everest shrinking, evolution accelerating, expansion of university climate groups, extinctions (ladybirds, pandas, pikas, polar bears, gorillas, whales, frogs, toads, turtles, orang-utan, elephants, tigers, plants, salmon, trout, wild flowers, woodlice, penguins, a million species, half of all animal and plant species), experts muzzled, extreme changes to California, famine, farmers go under, figurehead sacked, fish catches drop, fish catches rise, fish stocks decline, five million illnesses, floods, Florida economic decline, food poisoning, footpath erosion, forest decline, forest expansion, frosts, fungi invasion, Garden of Eden wilts, glacial retreat, glacial growth, global cooling, glowing clouds, Gore omnipresence, Great Lakes drop, greening of the North, Gulf Stream failure, Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, harvest increase, harvest shrinkage, hay fever epidemic, heat waves, hibernation ends too soon, hibernation ends too late, human fertility reduced, human health improvement, hurricanes, hydropower problems, hyperthermia deaths, ice sheet growth, ice sheet shrinkage, inclement weather, Inuit displacement, insurance premium rises, invasion of midges, islands sinking, itchier poison ivy, jellyfish explosion, Kew Gardens taxed, krill decline, landslides, landslides of ice at 140 mph, lawsuits increase, lawyers’ income increased (surprise surprise!), lightning related insurance claims, Lyme disease, Malaria, malnutrition, Maple syrup shortage, marine diseases, marine food chain decimated, Meaching (end of the world), megacryometeors, Melanoma, methane burps, melting permafrost, migration, microbes to decompose soil carbon more rapidly, more bad air days, more research needed, mountains break up, mudslides, next ice age, Nile delta damaged, no effect in India, nuclear plants bloom, ocean acidification, outdoor hockey threatened, oyster diseases, ozone loss, ozone repair slowed, ozone rise, pests increase, plankton blooms, plankton loss, plant viruses, polar tours scrapped, psychosocial disturbances, railroad tracks deformed, rainfall increase, rainfall reduction, refugees, release of ancient frozen viruses, resorts disappear, rift on Capitol Hill, rivers raised, rivers dry up, rockfalls, rocky peaks crack apart, Ross river disease, salinity reduction, Salmonella, sea level rise, sex change, ski resorts threatened, smog, snowfall increase, snowfall reduction, societal collapse, songbirds change eating habits, sour grapes, spiders invade Scotland, squid population explosion, spectacular orchids, tectonic plate movement, ticks move northward (Sweden), tides rise, tree beetle attacks, tree foliage increase (UK), tree growth slowed, trees less colourful, trees more colourful, tropics expansion, tsunamis, Venice flooded, volcanic eruptions, walrus pups orphaned, wars over water, water bills double, water supply unreliability, water scarcity (20% of increase), weeds, West Nile fever, whales move north, wheat yields crushed in Australia, white Christmas dream ends, wildfires, wine – harm to Australian industry, wine industry damage (California), wine industry disaster (US), wine – more English, wine – no more French , wind shift, winters in Britain colder, wolves eat more moose, wolves eat less, workers laid off, World bankruptcy, World in crisis, Yellow fever.

(list complete with intact links here)

and all on 0.006 deg C per year!

Advice of any omissions (with sources) or broken links is welcome at warmlist@numberwatch.co.uk

Hat tip to Paul Ceruzzi.