Some Light Link-Blogging

• A couple of months ago, I wrote about the computer chips that are starting to be embedded in passports. I was talking primarily about U.S. passports, but this country has been encouraging its allies around the world to follow suit. Via AMERICAblog, a reporter and a computer expert in The Guardian cracked the chip in new British passports. What's more, they did it with equipment that can be purchased for less than $350. But don't worry. The British Home Office says that even so, there's nothing to worry about. Everything's fine. I have no doubt the U.S. Office of Homeland Security is equally confident that they've got everything under control.

• I guess it's good to recognize one's mistakes and own up to them. But often it seems that coming clean helps no one but the one with the guilty conscience. A recent example comes from Dick Meyer, editorial director of CBSNews.com. As soon as you see the title of his column from Thursday, "Good Riddance To The Gingrichites," you've got a vague idea of where he might be coming from, but you still won't believe the first couple of paragraphs:

This is a story I should have written 12 years ago when the "Contract with America" Republicans captured the House in 1994. I apologize.

Really, it's just a simple thesis: The men who ran the Republican Party in the House of Representatives for the past 12 years were a group of weirdos. Together, they comprised one of the oddest legislative power cliques in our history. And for 12 years, the media didn't call a duck a duck, because that's not something we're supposed to do.

Pardon me for my naivete, but if it's not the job of the media to call a duck a duck, what exactly are they supposed to do?

• Mr. Show-Me-the-Straight-Talk John McCain was on This Week with George Stephanopoulos yesterday, and he said something puzzling. Think Progress offers the transcript, in which McCain flip-flops on abortion, moving from opposition to overturning Rowe v. Wade to support of overturning Rowe and turning the power to make abortion law over to the states. He didn't acknowledge the flip-flop (at least in the partial transcript provided at the Think Progress link), but he claimed he wanted the power to return to the states because he's a Federalist. There was a redefinition of that word some decades ago that I somehow missed altogether. Federalists first influenced American government over two hundred years ago when the Constitution was being written, and they believed in a strong federal government. Centralized power was what it was about. Apparently some time in the late '60s or early '70s, Richard Nixon introduced the New Federalism. New Federalism differed from traditional Federalism in that it meant almost exactly the opposite. Nixon's New Federalism wanted to take national powers and give them back to the states, and that's the sense in which McCain means it. It's all just more of the Orwellian twist politics can't seem to live without these days. And you expect nothing less from the Straight Talk Express.