MATT WELCH WRITES that the FBI and Los Angeles’ Mayor Hahn failed the truth test after the LAX shooting:

Well, at least now we know how Mayor James Hahn and the local FBI leadership will treat the public during a time of violent crisis:

Like children, who need to be lied to. . . .

It is one thing to be reluctant about jumping to conclusions — a perfectly normal and admirable tactic in high-profile law enforcement. But it is quite another to cross the line into actively encouraging a rattled public to conclude that it wasn’t an act of terrorism. . . .

Residents of L.A. need to trust that their leaders, when under fire, will shoot straight. Hahn and company have failed their first major test.

Welch rips them a well-deserved new one in this Daily News column. Also check out the L. A. Examiner’s report on L.A. videographer Mitchell Crooks, a “homeless, confused Nader fan.”

And, in an entirely unrelated item, Mickey Kaus explains why miscegenation is cool now!

VACATION AGAIN! Yep, I’m going on vacation for another week. Well, lots of people have been telling me to take it easy, so I’m following that advice. As Billy Joel says, working too hard can give you a heart attack-ack-ack-ack-ack, and there’s been enough of that going around the blogosphere lately to make me take his advice seriously.

I’m taking the laptop this time, so there may be intermittent blogging. But don’t send email, unless it’s really, really, really important. Important enough that you’d want to get it on your vacation. Capice?

In the meantime, read this piece by Rand Simberg on appropriate celebrations for July 20th, and as the day draws near read his weblog for more updates.

TIPS FOR BLOGGERS: If you’re using Blogger, the old Archive Bug Fix apparently doesn’t work. This new one does, according to Bobby Allison-Gallimore of BaggySlims.Com. Bobby writes:

I don’t know if you want to share this with your readers or not, since a lot of them (and those you link to) use Blogger via Blogspot, but it might help. I’ve found that in order for the direct post links to work these days, I have to republish the current month’s (or week’s) archives (under the archive section) each time I add a new post or series of posts to my weblog. Once I’ve republished the current month’s archive, the links seem to work just fine. So for instance, if I add a new post tonight, then I need to republish my July archive in order for the permanent post link to work.

Ugh. Well, there you are.

CRITICIZE THE STATE DEPARTMENT, GO TO JAIL: At least, that’s (sort of) what happened to Joel Mowbray of NRO. He was briefly detained by armed guards after asking some unfriendly questions. But NRO has the last word:

But for at least a few minutes, Mowbray had a harder time leaving the State Department than many Saudis have had entering the country.

Sadly, it’s also true.

THE L.A. EXAMINER HAS MORE on the Crooks incident.

This has gotten so much attention it’s starting to eclipse the incident he taped. Hey, you don’t think. . . .?

“GIVE THE PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT:” Yahoo is trying.

Oops. This isn’t Yahoo! Fooled me.

EVERYTHING NEW IS OLD AGAIN: The Indepundit reports:

The director of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a Bush appointee, instructed his enforcement chief to investigate allegations of insider trading by George W. Bush in connection with his sale of stock in Harken Energy.

LEGGO MY HUGO: Porphyrogenitus says Chavez is a dictator, pure and simple.

THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF CRIMINAL DEFENSE LAWYERS has filed an amicus brief on behalf of “dirtybomber” Jose Padilla. TalkLeft has more.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh has comments. This link works now; if it doesn’t when you try it, try his main page. Damn Blogger bug.

JONAH GOLDBERG BLAMES ISLAM. Well, the nasty Wahhabi part of it, anyway. Weirdly, John Derbyshire is taking a softer line.

AL QAEDA IN SEATTLE? Here’s a report from AP on the grand jury investigation.

MICHAEL BELLESILES has a new essay out on guns, and it’s getting bad reviews from Eugene Volokh and John Rosenberg.

ATTENTION BLOGGERS: N.Z. BEAR has a concrete proposal on what the Blogosphere should be doing to promote freedom in Iran.

Somebody tell Michael Ledeen.

GRAY DAVIS UPDATE: There’s good news and bad news in this latest Field Poll on Gray Davis. Bad news (from Davis’s standpoint): most voters think he’s doing a bad job. Good news: not as many as in April.

BEN DOMENECH HAS TAKEN THE BAIT with my earlier post on Judy Levine and teen sexuality. He emailed that he wanted to be sure he hasn’t misconstrued my own views. He hasn’t.

You’ll have to scroll, because — in the latest weird Blogger behavior — his permalinks aren’t working. Or, well, they work in that they take you somewhere — they just take you to a different post than the one the permalink is supposed to go with.

I don’t know what the problem is. I unsubscribed from Blogger’s email list a while back; I’m still technically a subscriber, I guess, but I don’t use it anymore.

It pains me to see it having so many problems. Blogger has done great things, and I probably wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t existed. But it seems to be developing more problems, not fewer, over time.

All I can say is, if this is too much for you Blogger users, Movable Type seems to work fine, and Stacy Tabb sure made the move painless for me.

UPDATE: Here’s another view, from The Compleat Iconoclast.

THE PROBLEM WITH FINANCIAL SCANDALS is that when you start digging you find that people from both parties are involved. That was the problem with Enron, and it looks like it’s happening again.

IMPLANTABLE NANOSENSORS: Here’s a new research program from NASA that’s another stop toward what I wrote about in my last TechCentralStation column.

Of course, there’s a downside, which is something I’ll write about in my next TechCentralStation column.

SOME READERS THOUGHT I WAS TOO HARD ON THE L.A. District Attorney’s office about the arrest of beating-videographer Mitch Crooks. They pointed out that he had outstanding warrants. (Yeah, but go try to get someone arrested on outstanding warrants sometime and you’ll see how little that means). But now the L.A. Examiner is reporting that Crooks is hospitalized with injuries received as a result of the arrest.

I said before it looked like witness intimidation. Now it really does. This stinks.

Memo to John Ashcroft: sounds like it’s time for a federal investigation.

PROLIFE LANGUAGE IN KASS REPORT: This isn’t exactly a surprise, but it’s still a good catch by TAPPED.

JOHN SCALZI has his own ambient electronic music available on his site. Check it out.

JASON RYLANDER notes claims that a cloned human baby will be born in December. I’m skeptical of these reports, but sooner or later, one of them will be true.

CLIMATE CLIMBDOWN: Back on June 18, I linked to data suggesting that a story on Alaskan climate change by Timothy Egan in the New York Times was, ahem, exaggerating things. Now Andrew Sullivan, who was also on top of this, notes that the Times has (sort of) admitted the error.

ELECTED DICTATORS: Can you be a dictator if you took power legitimately through an election? Readers seem to be enjoying this debate, so I guess I’ll weigh in further.

The short answer is “yes,” and in fact the original “Dictator” — a war leader used by the Roman Republic — was legitimately chosen, though he was “elected” by the consuls. (But as this Roman history page from the University of Texas illustrates, the Dictator is sometimes grouped with the elected magistrates. The Roman Republic — like our own system — was far from a pure democracy). The Dictators tended to abuse the, um, dictatorial powers they were granted, which led to the term becoming pejorative. (This is a cautionary tale regarding the grant of extensive wartime powers generally, of course, even through legitimate processess).

Reader John Monasch writes:

Will the “Chavez, dictator or democrat?” debate continue? I contribute the following recent, non-Nazi example of a democratically elected leader morphing into a dictator (in case you haven’t thought of him or others already):

Peru’s Alberto Fujimori

Please use him if you continue this mini-feud (it’s fun for the readers). This example also seems to back up Porphyrogenitus’s claim that people would be more outraged if Chavez was right-wing. I’m definitely a Reynolds partisan but I think that Alterman may have the advantage in that, so far, Chavez cannot be completely booted out off the democratic leader camp and into the dictator column. He hasn’t rigged or cancelled any elections (yet) a la Arafat and Fujimori and the shooting of protestors and jailing opposition has not quite reached dictatorial proportions (yet), but I could be wrong. I know he’s tried to tinker with the Venezuelan constitution but it may have been through proper legal challenges; I don’t know enough about the details to say for sure. He’s very iconoclastic.

Alterman may be right about the label you used but you, however, have the advantage in the big-picture argument in that Chavez (former failed coup leader) is a dangerous figure and needs to be watched, if not overthrown outright. Just because he’s not a dictator, doesn’t mean his actions are defensible. If he makes it to the next election, he’s toast and will probably cancel or rig them and then you will be able to laugh at Alterman. In the meantime, democrat or not, Chavez will continue to cause further misery and shame for the people of Venezuela. At least Fujimori did mostly good things for his country and is an anti-terrorist hero. Too bad he slipped into corruption couldn’t let go of power in the end. I have a hunch that if conditions in Peru worsen, Fujimori’s reputation may eventually be rehabilitated and he may even return from exile in Japan. Maybe not. He slipped pretty badly. But I’d take him, over Chavez any day. Alterman wouldn’t.

Well, I’m glad you’re enjoying this (very) mini-feud. We aim to please.

Personally, I’d say dictator is as dictator does — and more important than whether he/she was democratically elected is the question of whether he or she can be democratically unelected. Chavez, as I mentioned earlier, is no Hitler. But he’s hardly a posterboy for democracy and legitimacy, either. It seems clear that he’s willing to do pretty much anything, legal or otherwise, to keep and expand his power, which to me is the hallmark of a dictator.

Another example is Robert Mugabe — democratically elected at first, but a pretty indisputable dictator now. If you don’t want to count him as a dictator, then it suggests that your definition of dictatorship is too damned narrow.

UPDATE: Lynxx Pherrett notes that no similar outrage attended the removal of the Estrada regime in the Philippines:

Both Chavez and Estrada were clearly elected, both convincingly ran as champions of the poor, both fail(ed) as President, both were ousted in mob rule/direct democracy protests; Chavez was reinstated after counter-mob rule/direct democracy protests while the EDSA III protests/May Day riot failed to regain the Presidency for Estrada.

That the Left is acting outraged over Bush’s response to the events in Venezuela in 2002, after only mildly questioning while tacitly approving the Philippine coup in 2001, has more to do with their disapproval of Bush’s Mid East policies than any actual concern for constitutional procedures and the rule of law in other countries. In 2001, Bush wasn’t telling the Palestinians that they had better come up with some responsible leadership if they wanted to talk to the US, so both the Left and the Right could quietly watch a (mostly) bloodless coup in the Philippines. But now it’s a little over a year later, the Left had to squawk about Chavez to maintain their front of “principled opposition” to any Administration pressure for the ouster of Arafat.

I’m not sure that it’s concern for Arafat that’s the motivator here — even my cynicism has limits — I think it’s more that this presents an opportunity to attack Bush.

UPDATE: And no, this isn’t a “feud” that Alterman and I have cooked up to generate traffic. We’re responsible bloggers, and we wouldn’t do that.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Boy, but if we did, we’d be geniuses, judging by all the email this has generated. Reader Robert Hochman writes:

I noticed your discussion of elected dictators and couldn’t agree more with your analysis. Democratic legitimacy comes not only from getting elected, but most importantly from ruling and submitting oneself for re-election.

Without trying to be self-promoting, this is the very point I made a few days ago in the The New Republic online, when talking about democratic reform in the Palestinian territories. President Bush said that rejecting old leadership and adopting reforms is a pre-requisite to statehood. What he didn’t say, and what he should have said, is that electing new leadership that implements anti-terror policies, AND re-electing those leaders after a fixed term in office is a pre-requisite to statehood.

Yes. I think that being able to get rid of leaders is a greater hallmark of civilization than electing them in the first place.

THE ENTIRE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE CASE IS A FRAUD, reports Howard Bashman, citing this report that the girl in question isn’t an atheist and doesn’t mind the “under God” language in the Pledge.

Hmm. Since the suit was filed by her father, in his capacity as parent, I’m not sure how much this matters; you have two interests — hers in religious freedom (now apparently not in play) and his to raise his child. But that makes the case look more like Mozert v. Hawkins County school board, where the parents lost. Interesting development. Rory Little, who’s a pretty smart guy, is quoted in the story as saying it makes a difference.

It certainly provides a convenient way out for the Ninth Circuit, if it wants one.

COYOTE HOWLING has a bunch of cool links on space colonization, and arguments on why we should be working at it.

JEFF COOPER isn’t big on the idea of arming flight attendants.

SOME INTERESTING ECONOMIC DATA at RobertPrather.com.

TEEN SEXUALITY: Judy Levine writes that she’s for it.

CLONING AND MORE: As I predicted earlier, the elusive Virginia Postrel has reappeared, with multiple cloning-related posts, and more! I like this aside:

Fiscal watchdogs should take a look at the “council staff and consultants” list, which demonstrates that a) this really was a jobs program for neocons, particularly Public Interest alums b) people in Washington expect an amazing amount of administrative assistance. The commission had an administrative director, an executive assistant, a staff assistant, and a receptionist/staff assistant. Haven’t these people ever heard of computers?

BRAD DELONG says the economic news isn’t so bad.

TURN IN A COP, GO TO JAIL: The guy who shot the video of the Los Angeles police beating has been arrested as he waited to be interviewed by CNN:

Amateur photographer Mitchell Crooks was arrested outside CNN’s Los Angeles bureau where he was scheduled for an interview. Witnesses said he was screaming as he was driven away by plainclothes officers.

Authorities said Crooks was taken to the grand jury investigating the beating case. He had failed to appear before the jury Thursday morning as scheduled. Authorities said his arrest was unrelated to that case.

Sorry, but I don’t believe there’s anything routine about this. It looks like an attempt to intimidate a witness. Somebody at the L.A. County D.A.’s office should lose his/her job over it.

UPDATE: Hmm. Read this phone transcript. The DA doesn’t look any better.

I’ve been agnostic on this story — but now LA is acting like it’s got something to hide. That makes me believe they’re guilty.

REASON points out that George Bush may be positioning himself to the left of Barbara Boxer on the question of arming airline pilots. And he’s already to the left of Richard Cohen!

JOHN WEIDNER IS CALLING FOR BLOGGERS TO MOUNT AN OFFENSIVE in favor of freedom in Iran. Let’s do it!

GRAY DAVIS UPDATE: Today’s Field poll gives him a lead of only 7 points, and says his “supporters” don’t like him very much, they’re just uncomfortable with Simon. Daniel Wiener, who has been skeptical of Simon’s chances up to now, thinks that Davis is in trouble.

I’m no California political expert, but today’s power problems can’t be helping.

OKAY, THIS ISN’T REALLY NEWS: I remember a scientist telling me at a conference in 1999 that with a protein synthesizer and a computer anyone could make homemade viruses from scratch. But now someone has gone and done it.

Unfortunately, we’re in a technological window of vulnerability at the moment. In a decade or two, you’ll be able to manufacture a cure just as easily. But not now.

MARK, STEYN WRITES THAT IT’S ROPE-A-DOPE AGAIN — only it’s the Euros who are the dopes:

For Bush, it’s a win–win situation. If the Palestinians elect the Hamas crowd, he can say, ‘Fine, I respect your choice. Call me back when you decide to put self-government before self-detonation.’ If they opt for plausible state and municipal legislators, Bush will have re-established an important principle: that when the Americans sign on to nation-building they do so only to bring into being functioning democratic, civilised states — as they did with postwar Germany and Japan. Who’s to say it couldn’t work in Palestine? Not being a colonial power, the Americans don’t have that win-a-few-lose-a-few attitude — here a Canada, there a Zimbabwe — that the British have. So the Bush plan is perfect: heads we win, tails you lose. That’s also how some of these other international questions are being framed: heads, the International Criminal Court will be modified to our satisfaction; tails, we won’t have to do any more lousy UN peacekeeping.

The question Matthew Parris might like to ask as he weeds his borders is why could no European leader make a speech like that? How did it come about that the entire EU reflexively stuck with an aging terrorist who cancelled the last scheduled elections? Which bear is really the one with the little brain?

Personally, I think of the Europeans more as Eeyore: always talking about how nobody likes them and nothing’s going to work out, but being invited along anyway.

ERIC ALTERMAN can’t stop defending Hugo Chavez. But I don’t see where his comments about Hitler’s election differ from what I said below.

Alterman adds an unattributed version of Godwin’s Law:

[W]e have a rule in my house. If you have to go to Hitler, you’ve already lost the argument.

Well, we have a rule in my house, too: If you keep claiming that Gore really won in Florida, you’ve lost the argument, too. And the election!

UPDATE: Porphyrogenitus isn’t having any of it:

If he was a right-winger, then the behavior of the Chavez government and the mass protests against him would be an international cause-celeb and Chavez would be rightly drummed out of the community of “respectable” government leaders. Since he’s a Left-wing Fascist and friend of Castro, they’re ignored (and the Liberals and Leftists who usually claim to speak for “human rights” seem to admire him and say that anything against him is “contrary to democacy”). Typical.

Indeed, the double standard here is quite visible.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Dennis Bumb writes:

RE: Eric Alterman’s “Hitler Rule”

Mr. Alterman says “[We] have a rule in my house. If you have to go to

Hitler, you’ve lost the argument.”

I’m a big fan of Godwin’s Law, but when the topic of conversation is, I

don’t know, DICTATORS, then maybe bringing up Hitler is somewhat apropos.

Does the Alterman Rule also apply to discussions of genocide or the Nazis?

That must make for some weird conversations.

Well, I’ve never visited Eric’s house, so I couldn’t say.

ANDREW HOFER has uncovered an internal Al Qaeda memorandum that, apparently, didn’t make it to all the troops.

LOUIS FARRAKHAN IS DENYING earlier reports that he prayed for an Iraqi victory over the United States:

“I would never ask God to allow the American people, of whom I am one, to be slaughtered in a war or to die in a war for really what I see is a vendetta of our government against Saddam Hussein,” Farrakhan said.

Weirdly, this makes Farrakhan sound more patriotic than Stanley Hauerwas, who prayed for something very much like that:

Sober us with the knowledge that you will judge this nation, you will humble this nation, you will destroy this nation for our pride. Send us a reminder that you are God, that you alone have the right of vengeance, and if it be your will, make those we bomb instruments of your judgment.

IS THE L. A. TIMES GOING TO FOLLOW SALON’S BUSINESS MODEL? Sounds like it, based on this L.A. Examiner report. And is there a teensy bit of antitrust concern in that “priceless” quote?

SPEAKING OF STACKED PANELS: Now that the Kass Council is done, and turned out to be less stacked than it appeared, maybe there’s hope for this NAS panel on gun violence. Though one panel member denied being “rabidly antigun,” critics said otherwise. Let’s see whether they prove the critics wrong, or right.

TAPPED SAYS I’M WRONG about the insignificance of the Kass Council report on cloning. According to Tapped it signals a new political strategy: now that an outright ban on cloning has stalled, go for a “moratorium” instead. This is probably right — but its entirely political nature underscores the insignificance of the Kass Council’s expertise. You don’t need a panel of bigshot experts to be politically expedient.

A BACKDOOR EFFORT TO GET A NATIONAL ID? Read this. I’m against it. If we can’t keep the State Department’s employees from selling visas to terrorists, how are we going to keep lowly DMV clerks from circumventing this for pay?

LOOKING FOR A DIRTY BOMB: Now this is just plain weird.

TODAY IS THE FORTIETH ANNIVERSARY of the first transatlantic TV transmission, via Telstar.

Which, by the way, is also the title of a very cool song by The Shadows, produced by music-tech-geek hero Joe Meek.

UPDATE: Oops. Reader Chuck Freund informs me that it was the Tornadoes, not the Shadows. He’s right, too. Well, I was in diapers at the time. . . .

NPR IS GETTING IT FROM BOTH SIDES — while conservative groups say it’s biased, lefty alternative media say it’s sold out to corporations, and that it played an evil and inappropriate role in squashing low-power radio. Sadly, I think both groups are right.

NPR IS APOLOGIZING to the Traditional Values Coalition for suggesting, apparently with no basis whatsoever, that the group may have been behind anthrax attacks.

I’m sure I disagree with the TVC on at least as many issues as I do with NPR, but the report on NPR here sounds pretty damned bad — and all too typical, I’m afraid.

OBSCENE MORAL EQUIVALENCE, a continuing series: Here’s how Patrick Bateson, Provost of Kings College, Cambridge, justifies Mona Baker’s removal of two Israeli scholars from an academic journal based on their nationality:

Always,” he said, “science is set in social contexts.” As an example he cited Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor who tortured Jewish children in experiments.

“Supposing we had the possibility of collaborating with a Mengele,” Professor Bateson said. “That would be a case where everybody would say politics would definitely come into science, and say we could not let that happen.”

Sometimes I think I’m too hard on the Euro-academic crowd. But maybe I’m not hard enough.

BARBARA BOXER supporting armed pilots? And over the objections of the Violence Policy Center! That’s what Craig Schamp reports. The VPC’s star has really set.

UPDATE: Heck, these guys can’t even keep Massachussetts from liberalizing its gun laws. (Though once you get past the Globe’s hysterical coverage there’s not all that much going on here). Still, it’s Massachussetts. Looks like I was right when I said last fall that the tone was shifting on this issue.

THE KASS BIOETHICS COUNCIL has issued its report. The Post is treating the results as mixed, but anti-cloning people are crowing while researchers say the process was political.

But as I wrote in May, it doesn’t really matter. Bush has already made up his mind to oppose cloning, making the Kass Council a sideshow at best, phony political window-dressing at worst. The big news, if there’s any, is that the Council, despite looking stacked, was so closely divided. This suggests that anticloning legislation is going to continue to have trouble in Congress. That’s as it should be, since it’s none of Congress’s constitutional business anyway.

Here’s a link to the report. I’m going to try to read it later, though I’m very pressed for time, trying to get a project finished today. In the meantime, you can read this FoxNews column of mine from February, and see if you think the report answers the objections set out there.

UPDATE: Virginia Postrel hasn’t weighed in on this yet (in fact, she hasn’t posted in two weeks) but I imagine she will, soon. Meanwhile, Charles Murtaugh has a post.

GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS ABOUT IRAN: Tom Holsinger writes on StrategyPage that the mullahs are so desperate that they’re importing Palestinian and Iraqi mercenaries to keep their own people in line. “A tottering government’s resort to foreign mercenaries for domestic suppression, in lieu of existing regime-protection forces, indicates that its end is near.”

The bad news is, they’re also getting assistance from the U.S. State Department, which values stability over the collapse of a hostile regime. Holsinger says that this is typical:

The major issue here is the State Department, as it has been so captured by its foreign constituencies that it is effectively on the other side in the war on terror.

Sounds like major housecleaning is in order.

H.D. MILLER POINTS OUT that the odious Pakistani honor-rape decision is more about caste than about Islam.

CHRISTIAN BLOGGER MARTIN ROTH is disturbed by figures showing a correlation between non-catholic Christianity and HIV/AIDS incidence in Africa, and shows commendable honesty in worrying about what that means.

I’m not sure it means much. Over the years I’ve seen a lot of charts correlating AIDS incidence with everything from language to circumcision rates.

Roth also notes that Islamic areas tend to have lower rates. This may well be true (among other things, the widespread Muslim custom of washing before and after sex may help). On the other hand, they may just have lower reporting rates, for reasons of stigma. (This may be true of the Catholic Christian areas, too.)

Why AIDS has spread so extensively in Africa, and why rates are so different in different parts of Africa, remains a mystery. Religion might be the explanation, but there are a lot of other candidates.

THE MINUTE MAN says that armed pilots may not, ahem, “fly,” with European air security rules:

The bill applies to domestic and international flights. Left unanswered is whether the Euro-weenies will allow armed US pilots into their tranquil airports. Perhaps the bill covers this by deputizing the pilots into Federal service, but I wonder if it is that easy. There are also real issues here: if an armed pilot looks Germanic, there is a good chance that half of the natives on a flight to Paris will surrender.

This is an outrageous calumny. As the response to “shoebomber” Richard Reid demonstrates, French civilians are quite courageous when circumstances require. So unless the flight is full of French politicians, no surrender is likely to be forthcoming.

WHICH WWF IS FOR YOU? Tim Blair ponders the strange resemblance between wrestling and wildlife organizations.

EUROWEENIE ANTISEMITISM ALERT: German literary critic Martin Walser has a new novel coming out, said to be the first antisemitic novel published in Germany since the War. The book, Death of a Critic, features a thinly disguised version of a real person, well-known German (Jewish) critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki. Here’s what the Times says about it:

This being Germany, there is one other element in the book which has sent shock waves through the literary world. It is anti-Semitism. The principal character in Death of a Critic is a Jew — and not just any Jew. He is, in the words of Die Welt, “not a man, but a monster of corruption, of vulgarity, vanity and lubricity. He personifies the Jew as an object of hate.”

So this is more than just an attack on Reich-Ranicki, it constitutes an assault on his race as well. It is the first anti-Semitic novel to be published in Germany since the war. Realising this, the publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has hurriedly cancelled his plans to serialise it, describing the book as riddled with “anti-Semitic clichés”.

His nervousness is not surprising. Reich-Ranicki himself is not just any Jew. He survived the Warsaw Ghetto in the most dramatic of circumstances. As a young man in July 1942, he was deputed to take the minutes as Sturmbahnführer Hermann Höfle determined which Jews were to be “resettled in the east” and which would be kept back. Reich-Ranicki was allowed to stay. His parents were not. They did not survive.

So Walser’s attack is more than just an injured writer hitting back; it is, as the current literary editor of Die Welt, puts it, “an execution, a settling of scores, a document of hate”. The editor was particularly repelled by a sentence towards the end of the book where the critic’s wife observes that “getting himself killed would be out of character”. As a comment aimed at the sole survivor from a family destroyed by the Nazis it was, he noted, “nothing short of horrifying”.

And, sadly, not especially surprising these days.

CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER! Four airport screeners have actually been fired for incompetence!

ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE: The kids at Warbloggerwatch invited Howard Owens to Fisk them. He complied. It’s pretty much a waste of time, as their sloppy ad hominem attacks are unlikely to convince anyone anyway, but shooting fish in barrels can still be fun.

AL QAEDA IN THE UNITED STATES: This report is worrisome. 5,000 Al Qaeda operatives and supporters?

I’m a bit skeptical, unless the terms are defined rather broadly. And in a way it’s good news if it’s true: a group that big should be easy to infiltrate. But Al Qaeda will die based mostly on what we do abroad, not what we do playing defense at home.

THAT’S ECLECTIC! Stanley Fish’s postmodernism and Bush’s energy policy — deconstructed in adjoining posts on The Twelfth Parsec!

SCOTT ADAMS says there’s nothing to get excited about in today’s raft of CEO scandals:

But here’s the strangest backwardism of all: People seem surprised that captains of industry are stealing vast amounts of money at every opportunity. Back in our old dimension everyone assumed that C.E.O.’s and C.F.O.’s were weasels. Now it’s big news.

I think it’s useful to put these corporate scandals in perspective. Every employee I ever worked with in my old cubicle-dwelling days was pillaging the company on a regular basis, too. But the quantity of loot was rarely newsworthy. My weasel co-workers were pocketing office supplies, fudging expense reports, using sick days as vacation and engaging in a wide array of work-avoidance techniques.

Most people rationalize this kind of behavior by saying that corporations are evil and so the weasel employees deserve a little extra. The C.E.O.’s and C.F.O.’s aren’t less ethical than employees and stockholders; they’re just more effective.

MICKEY KAUS CONTINUES HIS FEUD with the MediaWhoresOnline crowd. Maybe we can get Jesse Ventura as guest referee.

TOOK ‘EM LONG ENOUGH: Amnesty International is finally condemning Palestinian attacks on civilians. Late as it is, this is another sign that the suicide-bombing campaign has failed.

BO COWGILL provides this link to a safe-sex-education videogame that you can play on the web.

Some people won’t like this. I think it’s kind of cute.

ANIMAL RIGHTS TERRORISM IN SEATTLE caused hundreds of people to be evacuated from a building. The “weapon” in question was a military smoke grenade. So is this really “terrorism?” Well, of the nuisance variety, anyway. It was calculated to inspire terror — and at a time when people are fearing terrorists’ use of chemical or biological weapons, it worked. It’s on a par with fake-anthrax mailings, which certainly count as terrorism.

Not one of those borderline, could-be-or-not cases, like, you know, shooting up an airport.

UPDATE: Reader Worth Colliton writes:

According to the SeattleInsider, the animal rights group calling itself “Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty” targeted Marsh, Inc., a company which insures Huntingdon Life Sciences.

Marsh, Inc. is a subsidiary of MMC, Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc., the largest insurance brokerage firm in the world. MMC corporate headquarters were located on floors 93-100 of Tower One in the World Trade Center, the floors which took a direct hit from the first plane on 9-11. MMC lost over 300 employees that day.

Nice folks. Brimming with compassion.

CATERINA FAKE WRITES about the Compassion Project ,which is soliciting photographs that will inspire compassion. I thought about submitting these two — but then I thought, hell, the originals didn’t succeed in inspiring much compassion, so . . . .

A PALESTINIAN PEACE ACTIVIST explains his strategy for peace.

MARTIN DEVON SAYS I’m wrong about the FBI’s reasons for downplaying terrorism.

WORRIED ABOUT A POPULATION EXPLOSION? Stephen Green explains who’s to blame — and who’s not.

RED HEIFER ALERT: The End Time is surely upon us.

TOMPAINE.COM is still quoting Bellesiles on the Second Amendment. Well, strictly speaking they’ve published a book excerpt that quotes Bellesiles, but it still doesn’t do much for their credibility:

Moreover, as historian Michael Bellesiles has found, actual firearms ownership in America has been greatly exaggerated and mythologized. He reports that, from colonial times to 1850, gun ownership never exceeded 10 percent of the population, owing in large measure to the scarcity of guns, which were difficult and expensive to produce, and the considerable difficulty involved in maintaining in working condition those that existed.

Well, that’s not going to do a lot for their credibility on this issue, given that even the National Endowment for the Humanities and Garry Wills have written off Bellesiles’ work . Next up: Joe Ellis on his Vietnam combat experiences!

NONE DARE CALL IT TERRORISM: Okay, so when NBA star Allen Iverson storms into a home and threatens two men while looking for his wife, the police want to charge him with “making terroristic threats.” Meanwhile, the Hadayet shooting at LAX still isn’t officially being called terrorism.

Reader Mike Branom, who sent the link, says he’s unimpressed with these developments. He should be.

THE FAT GUY responds to Al Qaeda bluster with a quote from Samuel L. Jackson.

THIS MORNING CounterSpin Central was pooh-poohing my “Condi in 2004″ point, saying that Cheney was going to be around for a while. But by this afternoon, he was saying Cheney is about to step down.

Condi in ’04!

THE RECORD INDUSTRY LYING? Surely not.

HERE’S A PAPER ON BIOLOGICAL TERRORISM that should have special appeal to Melissa Schwartz and Orchid.

TED BARLOW (permalinks not working — you Blogger types need to call Stacy Tabb and find something more reliable) says that I was wrong to cite Media Pundit’s take on the Harken affair.

Barlow may be right: I missed it, being blissfully unaware of the news while on vacation last week, and I haven’t really caught up. Barlow does, however, say that those discounting this scandal should apologize for hyping Whitewater.

I hope he doesn’t mean me. I never thought much of Whitewater — in fact, my 1997 book The Appearance of Impropriety: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business and Society (Free Press) was spurred in part by my belief that too much was being made of minor ethical lapses in the Clinton Administration. Lanny Davis has even used it as a text in his political communications class at GWU.

So I don’t think I can be accused of being a premature Clinton-basher. It was only later that I came to believe that Clinton was a sleazeball’s sleazeball, but that’s another story, and it doesn’t have much to do with Whitewater.

In the meantime, will all those (er, all us?) who said Whitewater was no big deal now change their stories, too?

NONE DARE CALL IT TERRORISM: My FoxNews column can be read now, though it’s technically for tomorrow.

REBECCA BLOOD nails it:

First a Department of Homeland Security and now a Corporate Fraud Task Force (or the Committee for Corporate Feasance, as I like to call it)…. And I thought that throwing more goverment at problems was the hallmark of a Democrat administration.

If only it were so. It was Nixon who presided over what scholars of administrative law call the “regulatory explosion” of the early 1970s. And he did it for political reasons that, I’m afraid, resemble those motivating the Bush Administration.

UPDATE: Nick Denton had a similar reaction.

STEVEN DEN BESTE has responded to an earlier post by Group Captain Lionel Mandrake on why Switzerland was never invaded. I tend to agree with Den Beste, though I think he’s a bit optimistic regarding the range at which Swiss soldiers could kill Germans.

IAIN MURRAY sends this link to a piece on “Air Rage” from 1999 in which he observed: ” Air rage, insofar as it exists at all, is an invention of airlines and the media, covering up a series of underlying problems with the industry as a whole.”

And it’s only gotten worse.

ERIC ALTERMAN wants to know how I can call Hugo Chavez a dictator when he was elected to office.

What does that have to do with anything? Hitler was elected to office.

Chavez is no Hitler, but he’s been using, ahem, extralegal methods including the shooting of unarmed protestors and the creation of unofficial armed gangs to intimidate his opponents. Sounds dictatorial to me. (Points off for the snarky Bush dig, too.)

And back atcha, Eric: would Ann Coulter really be “in jail” for her inflammatory comments if she were a lefty?

UPDATE: Brian Carnell notes that Chavez celebrated the 10th anniversary of his own failed 1992 coup attempt earlier this year, suggesting that it’s a bad idea to lean too hard on Chavez’s democratic bona fides: “Yeah, it must have been the CIA that put those thoughts of military coups into the heads of Chavez’s opponents, since Chavez himself is such a firm, outspoken supporter of democracy.”

Of course, people keep trying to tell us that Yasser Arafat is a democratically elected leader, too.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Several people have written to say that Hitler wasn’t elected. This is only sort of true. Hitler was originally appointed as Chancellor by Hindenburg in a busted-coalition situation. But that was legitimate under the Weimar constitution, and elections that confirmed Hitler’s power followed, as this capsule history from the BBC makes clear:

When he took office, Hitler was leading a coalition government. There were only three Nazis apart from himself. He immediately called a general election to try to win a majority.

On 27th February, just a week before the election, the Reichstag caught fire and burnt down. A communist, Franz van der Lubbe was arrested inside. Hitler used this as an excuse to arrest many members of the Communist Party, his main opponents.

The general election took place on 5th March 1933. the Nazis won 288 seats. This was not a majority, but 52 Nationalists supported them. At the first meeting of the Reichstag on 23rd March, the 81 Communists stayed away. Hitler could now do as he liked. . . .

When President Hindenburg died in August 1934, Hitler was finally able to gain total power and combined the posts of chancellor and president, giving himself the title of Fuhrer.

So unless you regard the parliamentary system, or at least coalition governments under a parliamentary system, as democratically illegitimate, I think it’s fair to say that Hitler was democratically elected. Sure, he behaved undemocratically once elected, but so has Chavez (and so has Arafat, whose “election” was far less legitimate than this) which was my point.

GRAY DAVIS UPDATE: Matthew Hoy says he’s trying to destroy a small newspaper that criticized him.

UPDATE: Daniel Wiener says Davis has the Democratic party scared over his vow to sign the “little Kyoto” bill, which Dems think will create referendum problems in November.

GOOD NEWS / BAD NEWS: RonK sends this Wharton study which finds U.S. corporate reports the cleanest in 31 countries.

That’s a response to Gerhard Schroder’s barbs, but it does make me wonder about the state of foreign markets.

TIM BLAIR says he’s figured out why Salon is folding.

JAMES LILEKS has some thoughts on realistic war games:

While doing a radio interview about computer-game violence the other day, I came up with a good definition of a “realistic” war game: they ship 45,000 copies, and only 15,000 of the games allow you to proceed past the beach. That’s it. No refunds, either. You get off the landing craft; your screen goes black; your computer seizes up and cannot be rebooted. Game over, man.

I don’t play computer war games, but this sounds like an idea that won’t sell.

JUST RAN ACROSS this amusing warblogger piece.

MORE ON AIRLINE SECURITY: Reader Dave Ragsdale writes:

Regarding the America West incident and general airport security rudeness, the point that security personnel aren’t even faking being professional and courteous anymore reminds me of a story Bill O’Reilly told on his radio show last week. His bag was being searched by the security guard, and when the search was done she began stuffing his clothes back in as though it were a laundry hamper. O’Reilly politely asked her to replace things the way she had found them, and she snapped, “Come over here,” and pulled him out of the line. Of course O’Reilly wasn’t having any of it and quickly called a cop over and demanded to speak to her supervisor and was ready to talk to the airline about her unprofessionalism. But the idea that a polite request to put items back neatly into a suitcase should trigger that kind of hostility and abuse to a passenger doesn’t seem very suprising these days.

To be fair, my experience with the security folks has been uniformly good, and I’ve been uniformly polite. But by all accounts there’s a lot of power-tripping going on by some of these folks.

This underscores my theory that by federalizing them the Bush Administration was really engaged in a stealth move to blacken the reputation of federal employees generally. Looks to be working. Of course, America West is doing the same for the airlines, so I suppose it could just be widespread incompetence.

I’VE GOTTEN SOME HOSTILE EMAIL about my links to Mickey Kaus’s posts on leftist political violence. So has Charles Austin. He’s posted this response.

UPDATE: And here’s another one.

BUSH NAMES FIRST HISPANIC TO SUPREME COURT, reports Howard Bashman.

DANIEL TAYLOR OF Dreaded Purple Master has been hospitalized after a heart attack. His wife says he’s expected to make a full recovery. Feel free to visit and leave your get-well wishes in the comments section.

He’s a trouper: “Daniel did ask for a room with an internet connection but the nurses just laughed.” Hey, a man’s gotta blog. If they can’t give me a room with a T-1, I just won’t get sick.

JUST NOTICED Enterprise Economy, a new economic news-and-analysis site run by Charles Oliver (formerly of Investor’s Business Daily).

FROM THE NOT-SERIOUS-ABOUT-THE-WAR DEPT.: Mickey Kaus reports that members of Congress have decided that homeland security isn’t important enough to justify actually firing incompetent employees!

AMERICA WEST UPDATE: Robin Roberts emails:

I think that the item you refer to re: America West tossing off a

passenger who joked about drunk pilots shows something I’ve noted

before. That airlines are treating their own customer service failures

as “air rage” incidents. How many businesses can deal with upset

customers by criminalizing them?

Absolutely. And this, of course, makes a mockery of security and antiterrorism.

TERRORISTS ON A TEST RUN? This story sounds alarmingly like the one told by James Woods. Only it’s from March.

UPDATE: Reader Frederick Larsen sends this note:

My sister is an America West employee (in Phoenix) who works at the boarding gates. She told me that last week boarding of a flight was disrupted by the presence of a group of 3 obviously Arabic men. Apparently they were not carrying or checking any luggage, were praying in the terminal (and a passenger alerted my sister’s boyfriend — also an America West gate employee — that they were praying about some pretty odd stuff, things that make you very anxious – I guess she understood Arabic). Of course, this had a bunch of the passengers very nervous. The pilots didn’t want to fly. Some supervisor apparently then interviewed the people and checked them out somehow and determined that they were not terrorists and cleared the flight for departure. Apparently about a dozen people chose not to take that flight.

This incident was scary enough for me to hear about, but to then hear that similar things are happening in other parts of the country REALLY makes me

worried.

Well, on the one hand you could say that this story proves the sytem worked. A reasonable suspicion led to a followup, which determined that everything was okay, and it was. I wonder, though: would a dozen passengers have been unwilling to fly with the woman who asked if the pilots were drunk? Probably not. But she wasn’t allowed to fly after further inquiry — she was bumped to another flight entirely.

Airline security is a joke. And it’s not a funny joke.

READER MARK WHITE writes that with Cheney getting flak over financial scandals, it’s time for the GOP to think seriously about moving Condi Rice onto the ticket.

Well, as the Ruffini-certified originator of the Condi 2004 boomlet, I’m all for that. Though I think perhaps the White House should be focusing on the war at the moment.

A PASSENGER WHO JOKINGLY ASKED IF HER AMERICA WEST PILOTS WERE SOBER was forcibly removed from the plane.

Best quote:

“Nowack said the crew decided to take the woman off the aircraft after determining that her remarks constituted a potential security problem.

“While this passenger may have been joking it is difficult to determine if someone is joking or serious. We take any comment regarding safety seriously,” she said.

Here’s a clue: when somebody says “I have a bomb,” it may be hard to tell if it’s a security threat. When somebody says “Are your pilots drunk?” it isn’t. Jeesus Christ, how stupid can the airlines be?

The worst part of becoming an airline employee, I guess, is when they stick a straw in your ear and suck out half your brains. And we trust these guys to operate potentially lethal equipment?

UPDATE: A reader writes to say that I’m unfair here. Pilots are under a lot of stress, and security is hard.

Yeah. But this wasn’t about security. This was about abusing security-related powers to take petty revenge on a passenger who said something the crew didn’t like. I don’t think I’m unfair to point this out. In fact, I think I was pretty gentle, considering.

BRING ON THE CYBORGS! And thank an engineer. My TechCentralStation column is up.

GERHARD SCHROEDER, reports Mickey Kaus is saying that the various U.S. accounting scandals prove that American-style shareholder capitalism is inferior to the European approach.

Anyone who believes this should read David Ignatius’s article on the Elf-Aquitaine scandal from last months’ Legal Affairs. That scandal — with its mafia-like behavior by government officials — suggests that European-style state capitalism has little to brag about in the scandal department. Indeed, the eagerness of American politicians to respond to things like WorldCom and Enron, compared with the coverups in the Elf-Aquitaine matter, suggests the opposite.

ENDLESS REHASHING OF BUSH V. GORE leaves me cold, but here’s an oped by Julie Hilden at Findlaw arguing that subsequent decisions by the Supreme Court suggest that the decision was a principled one.

I doubt this will change anyone’s mind, which is one reason why it’s hard for me to get excited about discussions of the case.