Pun Salad

Geez, there's a pile of good stuff out there today. Go read it:

• While the major parties fight over some things, there's often a chance that one side or the other might actually be, you know, right. But when a measure has "broad bipartisan support", there's an excellent chance it's a lousy idea rife with bad consequences, intended and unintended. That said, please see Bruce Schneier on REAL ID. Then you might want to check Orin Kerr's post at the Volokh Conspiracy for the other side (although Orin is also against the bill, he's just unconvinced by Bruce's argument). And then see comments on Orin's post.
• Thomas Sowell has a column today that made me pump my fist in the air and yell "Yes!". Well, in my mind. Small quote:

  Once you have ever had to go hungry, it is hard to get worked up over the fact that some people can only afford pizza while others can afford caviar. Once you have ever had to walk to work from Harlem to a factory south of the Brooklyn Bridge, the difference between driving a Honda and driving a Lexus seems kind of petty as well.

• I am officially In Awe of Dr. Wayne Daniel, a retired physicist living in Genoa, Nevada (population 8206, near Lake Tahoe; I looked it up). He's created a wooden puzzle of a nested set of Platonic solids (don't miss the graphic).

  The major hurdle was to design pieces with one of the solids on the outside and another on the inside. Most difficult, he said, was the outermost shell, "in which a set of pieces had to assemble into an icosahedron with a dodecahedral hole in the middle."

  … and you know how I feel about the dodecahedron.

• New Hampshire's own Mark Steyn has an interesting column betting on a (relatively) bright future for China, doom and gloom for Russia.
• Continuing the NH's-own theme, Shawn Macomber reports on a close encounter with Michael Dukakis, and judges him well on fashion sense, poorly on foreign policy.
• And probably the funniest blog headline I saw today is from Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passey; you'll have to click to see it, no spoilers here. I've added her to my blogroll as a result. Well, and also because she bills herself as "an aspiring Heinlein heroine." Yowza! (Via Tyler at Marginal Revolution.)