Noted whack-job Dennis Kucinich questioning George Bush’s mental health.

Steven Green:

I stopped voting Libertarian for local candidates, leaving lots of blanks on my ballot. Next year, I

Gee, maybe they need giant paper mache puppets. That always gets press coverage:

A group of 12 students chose to wear empty holsters to class this week at the University of Idaho as part of the nationwide protest.

Aled Baker, a junior, said he loses his constitutional right to protect himself and others when he steps on campus.

“It’s null and void when you go on campus,” the mechanical engineering student said.

Baker, a sportsman and hunter, has a license to carry a concealed handgun and hopes the protest will get people talking about the issue.

The Second Amendment continues to be the one that dare not speak its name.

And the Brady bunch stands in for Bull Connor and George Wallace.

“You don’t like the fact that you can’t have a gun on your college campus? Drop out of school,” said Peter Hamm, a spokesman for the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

Disarming law-abiding citizens today, disarming law-abiding citizens tomorrow, disarming law-abiding citizens forever.

Michael Barone says that it’s not 2006 any more.

“Crooks And Liars” lives up to its name. At least the “Liars” part.

Radley Balko wonders why Bush (and Cheney) haters would want Hillary!™ as president.

The 1990s, remember, weren’t exactly a decade of peace. Bill Clinton ordered more U.S. military interventions than any other post-WWII administration, and there’s no reason to think any of them were over Hillary’s protestations. She supported the U.S. military campaigns in Haiti, Kosovo, and Bosnia. She once boasted that as the tension in Kosovo mounted, she called her husband from her trip to Africa and, “I urged him to bomb.”

Hillary Clinton voted for both the Patriot Act and its reauthorization. She voted for building a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border. She voted to loosen restrictions limiting the federal government’s ability to wiretap cell phones. In the past, she has supported a robust role for the federal government in enforcing “decency” standards in television and music. She teamed up with former Sen. Rick Santorum on a bill calling for the federal government to restrict the sale of violent video games.

Leftists concerned about the entertainment industry’s increasingly imperial stand on copyright might take a cue from copyright guru Lawrence Lessig, who wrote on his blog for Wired magazine: “Of all the Dems, I would have bet she was closest to the copyright extremists. So far, she’s done nothing to suggest to the contrary.”

What about secrecy and executive power? It’s difficult to see Hillary Clinton voluntarily handing back all of those extra-constitutional executive powers claimed by President Bush. Her husband’s administration, for example, copiously invoked dubious “executive privilege” claims to keep from complying with congressional subpoenas and open records requests

Not that I’m a big Rudy fan, but this is one of the (few) reasons that I’m glad to no longer be in California.

California is one of the most blessed places on earth, in terms of climate and gorgeous scenery. It’s too bad that it was ruined by all the nutty (recent) Californians.

Mark Steyn:

Re: Harry Reid & Co matching Rush’s E-Bay take for charity, more than a few readers have suggested the easiest way for the Dem Senators to match the funds would be for Hillary to arrange for some itinerant in Chinatown to “bundle” a quick four mil.

There was a World War II charity campaign called “Bundles for Britain”. Senator Clinton needs to launch “Bundles for Harry”.

The real point, of course, is that Rush is donating his own money. The entire Democrat philosophy, though, is to do charity with other peoples’ money.

[Saturday morning update]

Harry Reid and the Letter of Doom.

Christopher Hitchens provides his thoughts on the subject, and some reviews of books about it.

I don’t think that this analysis is right:

Bowers theorizes: “[E]very single candidate has seen their numbers drop from the time when their candidacy was first announced or first rumored. After the announcement, people learn more about candidates and media criticism grows harsher. That might actually explain Clinton’s rise better than anything else, since she is so well known and opinions on her are so fixed that she had less to fear from the inevitable drop-off. In other words, that people have fixed opinions on her has actually been an asset, rather than a hindrance, to her campaign. … Clinton, by contrast, is a rock who has been through the meat grinder several times in the past. Things were not going to get worse for her, but they were going to get worse for everyone else.”

First of all, Hillary has never been through a meat grinder. At worst, she’s been scraped over a dull cheese grater, relative to what could have been done had the press been doing its job in the nineties. Also, her opponents aren’t going to bring up her sordid past, because as Democrats they were complicit throughout in covering it up, and completely accepted the corruption of the Clintons as the price for political power (the straw that broke the back of my support for Democrats for my lifetime, or at least until a new generation comes along that renounces the behavior of their forebears). And the Republicans and other foes of a Hillary candidacy (like me) are going to keep their powder dry until she is actually nominated, and lay down the most withering fire in the campaign, not over a year before the election.

One other point. Even if she had “been through a meat grinder,” that was then, and this is now, and there are a whole lot of voters who are unaware of the events of over a decade ago, because they were young and not paying much attention, or paying attention to only the salacious aspects, not the criminality and corruption. Now that young people get so much more information from the Internet, and the traditional media gatekeepers who protected the Clintons in the nineties have lost so much of their power, I suspect that we are going to be reintroduced to both of the real Clintons in the coming year, via people like the “Slick Grope Vets for Truth.”