Wasting away again in Margaritaville,

Searching for my lost watcher of blog…

The Agitator: Nifty Bush/Gore Coke/pop/soda thing you’ve probably seen on InstaPundit already; but if you haven’t, click here, it rocks.

The Chickpea Eater: Filioque update.

The Rat: Wedding scoop (congratulations Michael and Monica!!!)–the wedding is part of the marriage, not a separate weird insanity-fest. See E-Pression for more on the same subject.

Unqualified Offerings: Hedayet speculations; precrime copycats (and OK, I have now added Thomas Disch’s The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of to the incredible expanding reading list); anthrax update that actually mentions the media anthrax!!! (though even I forgot that Tom Brokaw got some thraxmail); excellent, justly Insta-blogged post on anti-Americanism right and left.

Los Volokh: Two interesting posts on recycling (I don’t bother–it’s not as if DC is going to get its act together enough to actually turn my trash into something useful…), and a hilarious look into the mind of Sasha Volokh. I can’t remember any super-funny dreams lately. National Review ran a little blurb a while back about some study that found that conservatives had more nightmares than liberals; and, well, I’ve been pretty conservative these past months. But I’m sure The Rat (who once had a dream about smuggling cheese!) will remember some of my more exciting nocturnal wanderings.

Matthew Yglesias: Why aren’t we even trying the rhetorical defense of freedom/hearts-and-minds angles we worked back in the Cold War? It’s a good and necessary point. Rhetoric is not only powerful in domestic affairs; it is, if anything, more important in international politics, where the differences between competing factions are greater and the stakes higher. We should be making the case for liberty, justice, and hope, and against Islamo-fascism. Jay Nordlinger mentions Radio Free Europe’s switch from the post-Soviet nations to the currently-Islamicizing ones. If anyone has info on what kind of thing RFE actually broadcasts, that would be great. In WWII, the British had George Orwell on the air slugging for England and anti-fascism; in what we might as well call WWIV, what do we have?

And a good what-if-no-1776? column from Jim Bennett; and what the dictionaries say about Joseph Stalin, statesman, and his pals.