OKAY, I’M NOT SURE WHAT THIS MEANS:

Bush administration officials confirmed today that Jay Garner, the retired lieutenant general who is the top civil administrator in Iraq, would leave here within a week or two and that other senior officials here will also be replaced.

American officials said Barbara K. Bodine, who has been in charge of reconstruction for the Baghdad region, was abruptly given notice and will be leaving within the next day or two. Ms. Bodine, a former ambassador to Yemen, will take a senior post at the State.

A bunch of other people are leaving too, which makes it look like the result of bureaucratic faction-fighting rather than demonstrated failures by one or another. Most of the reasoning presented sounds like spin of various varieties.

So is this good or bad? I don’t know. It suggests a certain amount of “disarray,” but on the other hand it also suggests decisive action. Maybe someone at the White House has been reading Salam Pax’s accounts and has decided to shake things up. . .

DANIEL DREZNER SAYS TODAY WAS A “DREAM SUNDAY” for the Bush Administration.

NOW THIS SHOULD BE INTERESTING:

An African American civil rights group is planning a Saturday protest against Greenpeace, alleging that the environmental group has committed “eco-manslaughter” through its support of international policies limiting development and the expansion of technology to the developing world’s poor.

The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) will conduct a counter demonstration at Greenpeace USA’s “Run for Your Life” 5K road race at Liberty State Park in New Jersey. The Greenpeace event itself will be a protest, meant to “raise awareness of the serious threats posed by chemical plants to New York and New Jersey residents and workers.”

CORE is using the event as an opportunity to confront Greenpeace activists about their opposition to infrastructure development projects in the developing world, opposition to genetically modified foods and the group’s opposition to the use of the chemical DDT to kill malaria-ridden mosquitoes, particularly in Africa.

“To serve its own ideological agenda, [Greenpeace] wants to keep the Third World permanently mired in Third World poverty, disease and death. So far, it has succeeded,” said Niger Innis, national spokesperson for CORE.

Read this, too.

DANG. The Klingon Interpreter story is, well, not exactly bogus — but there’s a bit less to it than meets the eye.

“NEW YORK TIMES AND WEEKLY WORLD NEWS TO MERGE:” Boy, people are really twisting the knife on this one.

ENTER STAGE RIGHT has an interview with Mark Steyn, the “one-man global content provider.” Excerpt:

9/11 was a great clarifying moment, it exposed the world of September 10th as a fiction, a collection of soft-focus illusions, and what’s happened in the period since is that the world has divided into those who recognized that and those who are still trying to patch up the Humpty Dumpty world of September 10th and prop it back in place – as the French are trying to do, and the UN, and much of the US Federal bureaucracy.

And there’s this shocking revelation: “I’m actually a —” No, never mind, you’ll just have to read it there.

PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY IS MAKING A MOTHER’S DAY ASSAULT on women in combat. But this makes no sense:

She contended that the women caught in the ambush of the 507th Maintenance Company in Iraq — Jessica Lynch, who was rescued by commandos, and single mothers Lori Piestewa, who was killed, and Shoshana Johnson, who was wounded — did not volunteer for the Army with the ambition of serving in combat.

A soldier is a soldier. You don’t join the Army and then decide not to fight. Doesn’t Schlafly know that? She also says: ” there is no evidence in history for the proposition that the assignment of women to military combat jobs is the way to advance women’s rights, promote national security, improve combat readiness, or win wars.”

No evidence? Not even the stunning and swift victory we just won?

MICKEY KAUS IS ACCUSING THE NEW YORK TIMES of “Nixonian” hypocrisy in its explanations of the Jayson Blair affair. And Andrew Sullivan is promising “flood-the-zone” coverage tomorrow.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis isn’t buying the affirmative action argument.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Bryan Preston, on the other hand, thinks there’s a Chief Moose connection. It’s interesting tea-leaf reading, but I have to say that other people seem to find this whole affair more fascinating than I do. Kind of like the Bill Bennett thing.

EUGENE VOLOKH has more on the Case Western shooter. Apparently, he was not only anti-war, but anti-gun.

Er, and hypocritical, too.

DAVID CARR WRITES that environmentalists are responsible for the deaths of millions of Third World people. And Nick Cohen basically agrees:

GM also upset the interests of the setters of style and taste. Marie Antoinette and her courtiers dressed up as peasants and shepherds. They invented a phoney authenticity and pretended to live the simple life while the real French peasantry was close to starvation. . . .

When it comes to the Third World, however, resistance to GM may be malign. The opponents of biotech emphasise that the industry isn’t interested in feeding the hungry any more than the pharmaceutical companies are interested in treating malaria. The developed world is where the profits are.

But there are inventions such as the ‘golden rice’, created by Dr Ingo Potrykus of Swiss Federal Institute in Zurich, which aim to relieve suffering. Dr Potrykus modified rice to help the 200 million or so children who risk death or blindness from vitamin A deficiency. If it works, and if it is taken up in Asia – two big ifs – children will live who would otherwise die.

Dr Potrykus isn’t a pawn of Monsanto, yet he is vilified. He has been told that he has been used by the biotech companies and that people will have to eat impossibly large amounts of his rice to get a minimal benefit. He denies both allegations. When he learned that Greenpeace had reserved the right to take direct action against golden rice tests plots, he said it would be guilty of a ‘crime against humanity’ if it did.

Historians are likely to write more in anger than amused bewilderment if the GM phobia turns out to have been a European mania which was fatal for non-Europeans.

Some of us are angry already.

MORE MATRIX-RELATED QUESTIONS: Mike Silverman asks:

If the capital of the free humans in The Matrix is Zion, does that mean that Neo and friends are Zionists? And will CAIR put out a statement denouncing the movie for being anti-Islamic because of this?

There’s a great fake press release waiting to be written by a talented satirist out there…

Indeed there is.

MORE ON THE ELF SCANDAL:

It is France’s largest-ever fraud scandal with tentacles stretching around the globe. But now the trail of corruption in the Elf-Aquitaine affair has led to the heart of the Dublin’s financial establishment and the Georgian grandeur of Fitzwilliam Square.

The Elf scandal has already dragged in senior French politicians. Now officials in Ireland will be scratching their heads as to how massive kickbacks paid by Elf were syphoned through Irish companies.

Over the past three weeks, Elf executives giving evidence in the latest trial in Paris have painted a picture of the multi-million franc kickbacks and bribes on deals from the early 1990s.

Last week, the court heard the extraordinary tale of the Spanish oil refinery, the Iraqi billionaire and the kickback payments that found their way into the accounts of an Irish haulage company.

I wonder where else those tentacles reach?

OBVIOUSLY, THE U.S. MARINES SHOULD HAVE POSTED GUARDS:

A work of art that has been described as “the Mona Lisa of sculptures” has been stolen from Vienna’s art history museum.

The 16th Century solid gold sculpture by Benvenuto Cellini was worth at least 50m euros ($57m, £36m), museum director Wilfried Seipel said. . . .

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that this might turn out to be an inside job, too.

HEY, IT IS A RACIST WAR AFTER ALL:

THREE of the Bali bombers whose attack on a nightclub last October killed 202 people have boasted of the crime, dismissing their victims — including 26 from Britain — as sinners. . . .

The club was chosen because the bombers thought it would be full of Americans, they said. In the event, seven Americans died while 89 victims were Australian. “Australians, Americans, whatever — they are all white people,” Ali said.

I’m proud to be on the non-racist side, anyway.

I WONDER IF THIS WILL MAKE THE BBC:

DOHA, Qatar (AP) – A small crowd of Iraqis harassed an Al-Jazeera television crew Saturday, accusing the journalists of supporting former President Saddam Hussein, the satellite channel reported.

Dozens of Iraqis surrounded the crew’s van and harassed the journalists, the channel’s newscaster said in the evening news bulletin.

“The angry locals accused the station of complicity with the previous regime (of Saddam) against the interests of the Iraqi people,” the newscaster said.

No one was hurt and the crew managed to withdraw after community leaders intervened, the newscaster added.

Heh.

HERE’S AN ANGRY IRANIAN BLOGGER who’s keeping a list of mullah-banned Iranian blogs.

(Via Jeff Jarvis, who has become Iranian Weblog Central.)

IF YOU LOOK TO THE UPPER LEFT, you’ll see that I’ve taken down the quote from Pravda about InstaPundit being “The New York Times of the bloggers.” It just didn’t feel right, anymore.

PEOPLE — INCLUDING SOME DEDICATED, SELF-ORGANIZED IRAQIS — ARE FINDING OUT MORE about what Jacques Chirac’s buddy Saddam was up to:

“My brother disappeared in 1981. My mother and father kept asking at State Security for his body and one day they disappeared, too. They told us don’t come here asking again.” Amin Hashem Amin raises both hands, displays eight fingers, thrusting them forward until he’s recognized. “Four first cousins and four good neighbors I lost,” he says. “We found the body of only one of them. Then they took our houses and our farm.” His face crumples, the other men look away politely, and Amin weeps. Some of these people are just looking; others, like Amin, have found their loved ones’ names on the lists. “I have 16 dead of my friends,” the next man to raise his hand says. “They gave us back two bodies, both without their eyes.”

And so it goes now at the offices of the Committee, hour after hour, day after day. Anyone who doubts the brutality of Saddam Hussein’s regime need only spend a little time here, at the epicenter of efforts to unravel what happened, account for the dead and missing, locate the bodies in the mass graves that are daily being discovered throughout the country.

The Committee’s view is that Saddam Hussein’s regime slaughtered 8 million people; in a country of 25 million that’s a pretty extreme estimate. “Hitler was a minor student in the school of Saddam, and not a very good student by comparison,” Idrisi said. “Just in my small family, my cousin was in prison, my father, brother, and five or six other cousins disappeared,” he said. Saleh agreed. “No family in Iraq is without its missing. My brother, too. Still I haven’t reached his grave, but I saw the file.”

Challenging such over-the-top figures provokes annoyance among the Committee members. “How can we have 8 million? I’ll show you.” Saleh produces an armful of fat file folders. “Look at this one. Look at the file number.” It’s stamped TOP SECRET, labeled Department of General Security, Branch 45, File No. 12584. Branch 45 specialized in the banned Shiite group Al Dawa. This is a case file concerning one Satter Jaber Meslain, an investigation that lasted from 1981-1983. As the result of his confession and other investigative leads that his interrogation produced, 55 persons are implicated; all are listed here as condemned to death on one page, and then, on a paper dated hours later, confirmed “hanged by a rope until dead.” On the front of the file folio is a strip of computer stickers, the kind used to track inventory, bearing the number 507989493; they seem to be file locators. “Look how big that number is. It was indescribable what they did. There are millions of files, millions.”

However many there are, it’s a lot. The guy who runs the copy shop that my wife uses is an Iraqi exile — something he didn’t talk about until after the war. He told my wife the other day that when he was still living in Iraq in 1991, the family next door in Baghdad was killed by Saddam’s thugs one night, and he decided to leave the country the next day. He was quite harsh to a UT professor who tried to show “support” by saying that he had opposed the war.

TIM BLAIR — COMMUNIST? These photos don’t lie. But he can’t be “boring from within,” because whatever else Blair is, he’s not boring.

I THINK THAT EVERYONE SHOULD BE RELIEVED that this story is purest fiction.

LOOTING UPDATE:

Matthew Campbell, Baghdad
THE furore over the looting of Iraq’s national museum took an unexpected turn yesterday when workers accused their director of conniving in the theft of priceless antiquities during the chaotic collapse of the regime in Baghdad.

Fifty museum employees staged a protest in which they waved placards under the noses of American investigators proclaiming that Jabir Khalil, chairman of the Iraqi state board of heritage and antiquities, was a “dictator” and a “thief”. . . .

The investigators, too, have expressed suspicions that the plunder was facilitated by museum employees. Objects had vanished from a storage vault outside the museum to which museum officials had access. “It may turn out to be an inside job,” said one investigator. “Whoever did this seemed to know exactly what they were looking for.”

A full account of what is missing has yet to be given. Even so, officials concede that the losses may be less severe than at first thought, when talk of looters carting off thousands of ancient carvings and crushing pottery underfoot prompted international outrage at America’s failure to intervene.

Since then, indignation has been fuelled by suggestions that some of the thieves were directed by professional collectors abroad. Museums around the world have pledged not to trade in items that may have been stolen in Baghdad.

Suspicions about the involvement of staff with knowledge of the underground vaults are growing.

Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Roger Simon was ahead of the curve on this story!

MORE WEB DETECTIVE WORK regarding the Case Western shooter, over at The Volokh Conspiracy. Fascinating.

SELL YOUR ARBY’S STOCK: Mike Hendrix is Fisking the new “Homestyle Pot Roast sandwich:”

“Reminiscent.” Yeah, right. I suppose you could say it’s “reminscent” in the sense that it is in fact made from some sort of meat or meat product. I’m mildly surprised that my mom hasn’t called me in tears yet after seeing this commercial, begging for reassurance that her pot roast was never like this. I know pot roast. I’ve cooked pot roast. You, sir, are no pot roast.

Read the rest.

A READER IS UNHAPPY ABOUT THIS:

PORTLAND, Oregon (AP) — Position Available: Interpreter, must be fluent in Klingon.

The language created for the “Star Trek” TV series and movies is one of about 55 needed by the office that treats mental health patients in metropolitan Multnomah County. . . .

“There are some cases where we’ve had mental health patients where this was all they would speak,” said the county’s purchasing administrator, Franna Hathaway.

County officials said that obligates them to respond with a Klingon-English interpreter, putting the language of starship Enterprise officer Worf and other Klingon characters on a par with common languages such as Russian and Vietnamese, and less common tongues including Dari and Tongan.

I just think it’s cool. But will they get a Neo chaplain next? He can share an office with the Jedi.

FREQUENT INSTAPUNDIT CORRESPONDENT DAVID BERNSTEIN has started a blog. So has not-quite-so-frequent correspondent Greg Burch.

Be warned (er, or enticed!) — they’re both lawyers. Well, Bernstein’s a law professor, but close enough.

DORIAN HO is making SARS look as good as is humanly possible. I’d award an “A” for effort, anyway.

JACOB SULLUM is writing about the idiocy of the assault weapon ban — and the dishonesty of those who are pretending that it accomplishes anything:

To get around the fact that “assault weapons” are rarely used by criminals, the VPC is now claiming that from 1998 through 2001 “one in five law enforcement officers slain in the line of duty was killed with an assault weapon.” This estimate is padded by the inclusion of weapons that Congress does not define as “assault weapons” but that the VPC does. In any case, it indicates that the vast majority of cop killers use guns that no one considers to be “assault weapons.”

Notice, too, that banning guns does not prevent them from being used in crimes, which makes you wonder what good even an “improved” ban could be expected to accomplish. Even if cop killers were fond of “assault weapons” and if passing a law could magically eliminate them, it’s absurd to imagine that violent criminals could not find adequate substitutes.

The “assault weapon” ban sets a dangerous precedent precisely because the justification for it is so weak. It suggests that you don’t need a good reason to limit the right to keep and bear arms, and it invites further restrictions down the road. As far as the gun banners are concerned, that is the whole point.

Funny that we don’t see many journalists asking the VPC tough questions about its stance on these issues.

WHAT DO YOU GET WHEN YOU’RE JAILED AND THEN EXONERATED: Damn near nothing, writes Emily Bazelon in The New York Times:

Yet when the wrongfully convicted gain their freedom, they’re usually not entitled to the social services, like help with housing and jobs, that other released convicts receive. (They’re not on probation or eligible for other ex-offender programs.) Just as troubling, they rarely get any money from state governments to make up for the years of lost freedom, livelihood and time with loved ones.

For what they’ve suffered, these victims deserve better. Since the state fractured their lives, it should help them put the pieces back together.

Most of the innocent get little or nothing because only 15 states and the District of Columbia have laws to help the exonerated collect damages. And some of the statutes aid very few people, either because they severely restrict awards — in California the ceiling is $10,000, no matter how long the unwarranted prison sentence — or limit relief to those lucky enough to get a pardon from the governor instead of relief from a judge.

I think that people who have been wrongly jailed deserve some genuine compensation. Ten grand is pathetic. A hundred grand seems modest. But nobody wants to admit mistakes, and compensation would seem like an admission of just how much harm was done.

READ THE WHOLE THING: Michael Barone writes about Hard America and Soft America, and he’s onto something big.

ANDREW SULLIVAN AND MICKEY KAUS are all over the Jayson Blair affair, and Howell Raines. And it looks like they’ve got the goods.

It certainly appears that my earlier skepticism regarding the role of affirmative action in the Blair matter was misplaced. (See this post, too.) I suppose that’s what I get for giving Raines the benefit of the doubt, but, hey, InstaPundit is all about excruciating fairness.

I MISSED THE STORY about the Case Western shooting, but Matthew Rustler has been on the case.

UPDATE: Charles Johnson notes something interesting about the shooter:

Halder was a very active and outspoken member of the loony left anti-war crowd; here is his home page. He was a signer of the Student Committee of the Iraq Action Coalition and the Not In Our Name petition.

Well, “anti-war” isn’t necessarily the same as “nonviolent,” of course. . . .

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh notes an interesting inconsistency.

KEN LAYNE HAS ONLINE MUSIC over at MP3.com — and it’s pretty good. Kinda like a cross between the Stones and Webb Wilder. Which can’t be bad.

JEFF JARVIS HAS MORE ON COURAGEOUS IRANIAN BLOGGERS — and “courageous” is the word. These people aren’t just courting a modicum of criticism on the Internet. They’re in danger of being killed by the increasingly-desperate mullahs who still sort of run that unfortunate country.

HAVE YOU EVER NOTICED THAT WHEN JOURNALISTS ATTACK BLOGS they usually seem to make some sort of stupid, glaring error that completely undercuts their point?

That’s what the Toronto Star did in attacking Stefan Sharkansky. Despite it being right there in print (well, pixels) columnist Antonia Zerbisias managed to attribute to Stefan a quote that was actually by an anonymous commenter.

Was it utter, unforgivable sloppiness — or actual, deliberate malice?

Who cares? It’s more proof that having an editor and a paycheck doesn’t make you God. Or, apparently, even minimally competent.

But as Stefan points out, it can make you popular with Holocaust deniers.

UPDATE: Spoons says I’m wrong:

Zerbisias attributed the quotes as what is being said on web logs and web forums. His attributions were correct. He never attributed the quotes to any particular individuals, and I don’t think he made an error at all, much less an error as horrible as you suggest.

Well, it’s true that Zerbisias said that the statement appeared “on usefulwork.com,” and that, literally, it did, though as a comment. But to say that something appeared “on” a blog is pretty obviously attribution to the blog’s author, in my opinion. You could say that, literally, that’s not necessarily the case and that everything in the comments is “on” the blog, but that kind of attribution is only fair if it’s fair to attribute things said in letters to the editor to the newspapers they appear in. (Er, and I think Zerbisias is a she.)

HERE’S THE LATEST on jailed Iranian blogger Sina Motallebi. He’s accused of selling “depraved” videos — of weddings.

Note to Iranian mullahs: you’re utterly pathetic. You are neither feared, nor respected for your piety. You’re just a joke, in the eyes of the world and, these days, your own people.

BILL HOBBS IS ASTOUNDED BY THE REACTION to his piece on the Bush/AWOL question. He admits to committing premeditated journalism.

MORE ON THE LOOTING THAT MOSTLY WASN’T:

AMERICAN investigators in Iraq have found safely locked in vaults almost 40,000 manuscripts and 700 artefacts previously believed to have been looted from the National Museum in Baghdad.

Next we’ll discover that the Jenin massacre never happened. Oh, wait. . . .

RANDY BARNETT IS DANCING ON BILL BENNETT’S POLITICAL GRAVE:

Bennett is more than a moralist; he is a prohibitionist. And he is more than a prohibition advocate, he was the drug-czar almighty. For years he defended the current policy of ruining the lives of drug users — regardless of whether their actions were harming others. Many of us still recall his condescending reply to Milton Friedman’s open letter to him in the pages of the Wall Street Journal where he chided the Nobel Prize winner to be serious. From editorial page to podium, Bennett loudly and righteously defended the policy of wre[a]king havoc on his fellow citizens who indulged in different vices than he did — whether or not their vices happened to interfere with their abilities to perform their jobs or be good parents. It did not matter whether or not they had “spent the milk money.” All that mattered was whether they were caught by the cops. Then off to the clink with them.

Kurtz says that Bennett is entitled to run a different cost-benefit calculation for gambling than for drugs. Then why has he now said he is setting a bad example to others and quitting? Either he has just changed his cost-benefit analysis this week, or he was a hypocrite last week.

Read the whole thing. Meanwhile Peter Beinart has a long Bennett-savaging piece, too. But although it’s about hypocrisy, I find it a lot less persuasive than Barnett’s take. Beinart writes:

And, while Bennett may be one of Washington’s most high-profile right-wing moralists, he’s surely not alone. John Ashcroft, Rick Santorum, Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jesse Helms, Alan Keyes, Sean Hannity–they would all come in for similar scrutiny. In fact, dozens, if not hundreds, of Republicans in Congress have probably said the same things about private morality as Bennett. If this sounds like a slippery-slope argument, it is. I don’t see any clear principle that justifies exposing Bennett’s gambling that wouldn’t justify prying into the private lives of most public representatives of the cultural right.

Sorry, but this conveniently one-sided standard, which Beinart sort-of decries but also sort-of deploys, won’t wash — at least, not until the mainstream press, and the Washington punditry, is willing to make as much of the way big-name moralizing lefties like Michael Moore treat the help as it is of the vices of right-wing moralizers. And that day is nowhere close at hand. Otherwise the scandal at living-wage-activism center ACORN would be getting the kind of attention that would be afforded to a sex scandal at Moral Majority headquarters.

UPDATE: Virginia Postrel emails:

I think you read that Beinart piece wrong. It’s not an attack on Bennett, though it has plenty of nasty things to say about him. It’s an attack on people who’ve suddenly and conveniently jettisoned their alleged social liberalism to attack Bennett.

Well, I puzzled over that, but I think Beinart is trying to have it both ways here, which is what I meant by the language about decrying and deploying. He’s sort-of complaining about people jettisoning their alleged social liberalism, but he spends a lot more time attacking Bennett’s hypocrisy in terms that sound an awful lot like the pseudo-liberals he’s talking about.

RICH LOWRY HAS A QUESTION THAT I’D LIKE TO HEAR ANSWERED — by Bill Lockyer and John Ashcroft, for starters:

Our tolerance for prison rape, considered a subject fit for late-night TV humor, is a great mystery. We profess to abhor rape, to adore personal dignity, to uphold the rights of the downtrodden — yet we sentence tens of thousands of men every year to the most bestial kind of abuse, without a second thought beyond the occasional chuckle.

The silence surrounding this national shame has been broken by a right-left coalition in Washington that is pushing federal prison-rape legislation, likely to pass and be signed into law this year. It will be a first step to alleviating the problem, if not the end of the vile jokes. . . .

The bill seems impossible to oppose, but that hasn’t stopped elements of the Bush Justice Department from resisting. They worry that the bill trespasses on federalism principles, even though the Supreme Court has held that deliberate indifference to rape violates the Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

I don’t see the federalism issue here — you’ve got state action, and a violation of constitutional rights. So where’s Ashcroft on this?

UPDATE: Reader Ken Landa has a suggestion:

Maybe the energy of those intent on protecting those vile consensual-sodomy prohibitions could be channelled into doings something about _forced_ sodomy in penal settings.

Indeed.

UPDATE: TalkLeft has more on this.

HOWARD KURTZ REPORTS THAT everybody hates Mike Bloomberg. It’s spun mostly as a failure of political savvy, but I wonder if Bloomberg’s policies don’t have as much to do with it as his political clumsiness. Bloomberg seems to want to turn New York into Singapore — only without the efficiency or prosperity. It’s not just that he’s a political naif, it’s that he’s a bossy, priggish assaulter of all that New York is supposed to be about.

UPDATE: Well, Bloomberg has his defenders, as reader Clay Boswell writes:

You suggest that Bloomberg is hated because his policies are contrary to what New York is supposed to be about. Which policies are you referring to? The smoking ban–okay. What else? He’s not responsible for the MTA fare increase–those are Pataki’s people, though nobody seems to recognize that. The school system needs changing, and he’s moved there–the only people bothered by that are the bureaucrats in the school board and the people in Albany who won’t let go, whether they know what to do with their power or not. And the teachers who shouldn’t be teaching–I doubt you sympathize with them. The tax increases? Is New York about low taxes? If they don’t rise at least temporarily, New York is going to be about bankruptcy.

On the other hand, reader Dave O’Leary writes:

You hit the nail on the head. He wants to put training wheels on the City. Additionally, we elected him in the hopes that his business acumen could guide us through the tough economic times that obviously lay ahead. Instead he shown himself to be an adherent of everything that’s been wrong with NYC economics for the ages. His solution to every financial problem is the same, raise taxes. Additionally, he destroyed much needed credibility by citing fictional statistics during his smoking jihad. The first act of his successor, anyone but Sharpton please, should be to run him out of town.

The smoking ban seems to be a special irritant, and not just among smokers.

DIGITAL COMMUNISM AND MARX’S NIGHTMARE: Arnold Kling reflects.

PAUL STAINES SUGGESTS THAT IRAQ should honor its debts to Russia, “with easily and cheaply sourced Czarist bonds.”

HUGH HEWITT HAS BEEN SLANDERING JAMES LILEKS. But at least he didn’t mention the underwear thing.

MICKEY KAUS wonders why Paul Krugman is keeping silent.

PATRIOT II SNEAKING IN THE BACK DOOR? TalkLeft notes that — though the bill was “just a draft” — it appears to be being passed piecemeal.

MARK KLEIMAN WONDERS: WHAT’S RIGHT WING about opposing reactionary theocrats?

Yeah, I’ve wondered that, too.

UPDATE: And Rand Simberg was wondering that quite some time ago.

MORE REPRESSION OF INDEPENDENT THOUGHT IN JOHN ASHCROFT’S AMERICA:

Animal rights protesters vandalized the home of two UCLA researchers last week, according to a police report filed by the victims.

On-campus demonstrations that coincided with World Week for Animals in Laboratories were followed by protests in some researchers’ neighborhoods Monday.

John Schlag, a neurobiology professor, and Madeleine Schlag-Rey, a neurobiology researcher, two targets of animal rights activists, said their home was damaged by protesters.

At 10:15 p.m. Monday night, Schlag said they heard a lot of noise on the street, followed by loud banging and kicking on their door.

“The way it proceeded … we felt that the door was going to be kicked in,” Schlag-Rey said.

The Schlags, whose research focuses on the mechanisms of human sight, filed a police report with the Los Angeles Police Department that listed a broken street lamp and a broken door window as a result of the vandalism. Neighbors told the police that the suspects were wearing masks and dark clothing.

People told me that if Bush became President, we’d have masked thugs banging on professors’ doors in the middle of the night.

And, what do you know, we do.

UPDATE: Okay, not everyone got this:

Your sense of irony may be a little TOO subtle, Glenn. When I read the entry entitled, “MORE REPRESSION OF INDEPENDENT THOUGHT IN JOHN ASHCROFT’S AMERICA:”, I sat down to rip out a protest letter. I mean, Bush and Ashcroft have plenty of policies that should be opposed, but how do you hang this around their necks? Then I detected the irony (I think).

Then there was this:

Maybe I’m just a bit dim, but I don’t get the connection between the animal rights thugs and Mr. Ashcroft. I understand you have concerns with civil liberties with him as AG, but to suggest some kind of link between the two is pretty far off the mark.

I think it’s fair to say that the animal rights groups are very far to the left and antigovernment while Mr. Ashcroft is fairly conservatives.

The post was not consistent with your usual quality.

Apparently not. I was paraphrasing the famous joke: “They told me if I voted for Goldwater we’d have half a million men in Vietnam. And sure enough, I voted for Goldwater and. . . .”

INSECURITY AND HIERARCHY IN THE HUMANITIES: An interesting post, with links to still more, from Invisible Adjunct.

SARS UPDATE: Russia is closing down air travel with China. This worries me, since the Russians, quite probably, have a better idea how bad things are in China than I do, and I think that things in China are worse than the media coverage suggests. (Though here is a worrisome media story about 10,000 people being quarantined in Nanjing.)

I hope that I’m wrong, and that Michael Fumento is right, and that this is all overblown.

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE INTERNET. Now close those pop-up ads, you asshats!

MATT WELCH HAS MORE ON WHAT CASTRO IS DOING in the unsung part of Cuba that’s not Guantanamo.

HERE’S MORE on new legislation relating to nanotechnology, from The Hill.

OKAY, THIS STILL DOESN’T MAKE IT RIGHT, though it does make it less unique. Here’s another picture of Clinton in military garb on an aircraft carrier.

I still don’t think that Presidents should do this. Nor do I think that it’s wise for Republicans to set standards based on what Clinton did.

UPDATE: John Cole has more. And then there’s this.

ANOTHER UPDATE: All right, already! Here’s more, and yet more again.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Bruce Rolston says I’m not wrong. Woohoo! He hardly ever says that!

MADONNA IS THANKING THE FRENCH for opposing the war.

I’M PRETTY WELL OVER THE WHOLE BILL BENNETT GAMBLING FIASCO, but there’s lots more over at The Corner.

As a libertarian, I’m against bans on gambling. But, that said, I actually think that gambling is probably more socially destructive than many things that morals-types crusade against, like, say, sodomy.

Gambling, after all, sends the signal that the best way to get rich isn’t to work long and hard, but to look for the quick score. (Even worse, that message is specifically a lie in the context of gambling, where long-term players generally wind up cleaned out.) Call me crazy, but that seems to me to do more to undermine society than gay people getting married.

Justin Katz, however, disagrees.

KEN LAYNE HAS SOME HIGH POINTS from the recent update to Salam Pax’s blog.

THE E.U. — HAVEN FOR CAT-SKINNERS? Apparently so:

BBC News has seen evidence which suggests that cats are being farmed for their skins in the European Union.

It is thought that tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of cat and dog skins are traded in Europe each year . . .

A video seen by BBC correspondent Tim Franks shows one Belgian furrier displaying a blanket he says was made from cats farmed in Belgium.

What is more, he says that stray cats and dogs are rounded up and skinned.

That would seem to contradict the assertion from the officials who help run the EU at the European Commission that there is no cat or dog farming inside the union.

You can’t make this stuff up. God knows what Margaret Drabble would be saying about this if America were involved.

TENNESSEE’S LEGISLATURE IS CONSIDERING A HORRIBLE BILL, modeled on the DMCA. Bill Hobbs has been blogging about it, (be sure you read this post of his in particular,) but you should check out the Tennessee Digital Freedom Network for more information on what looks like a miserable sellout to Big Entertainment at the expense of Tennesseeans’ freedom and prosperity.

HEY, thanks to all the folks who hit the PayPal and Amazon Honors buttons over the past week. It’s much appreciated.

BILL HOBBS HAS A LONG POST ON THE “Bush was AWOL” story, and says it’s bunk.

THE ILOO WEB-ENABLED TOILET doesn’t provide much of a blogging platform, according to this report.

MORE VIDEO STUFF: Over at the University of Tennessee Law College website we’ve got a streaming video of interviews with students. We did a poll and focus groups on student attitudes and discovered, interestingly enough, that our students are happier than we thought, and that they generally like law school better, and for different reasons, than they expected when they decided to come. So we’ve got a couple of dozen of them talking about what they like and why. The rather high degree of diversity shown, by the way, wasn’t deliberate: the Student Bar Association put out a call and this is who showed up.

I think we may break this down into several shorter elements, as it’s a bit long, but it’s not bad as a first effort.

SILENT RUNNING has moved. Drop by, say hello, and luxuriate in the fact that the permalinks will probably work now.

ROD LIDDLE WONDERS WHY THE BBC CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH:

Where did this political correctness come from, and why is it swallowed and then spat out so unquestioningly? It’s a sort of terror of the truth, arrogant in its assumptions because it believes ‘ordinary’ people cannot cope with the truth and need it either sweetened or altered entirely.

You could see it at work during the war in Iraq. Now, I was opposed to the war but I was aware that the military campaign was carried out with devastatingly brilliant precision and speed. And yet, watching television — Channel 4 or the BBC or, for that matter, Sky — there seemed a determination to present at every juncture the worst-case scenario as if the war, because it was inherently ‘immoral’, could not therefore possibly be expedited with success. Maybe it is just my imagination, but I seem to remember being told, every night, that the prospect which awaited our troops was a ‘quagmire’ of ‘hand-to-hand street fighting’. Where’s the quagmire, huh? Where are the fights? I don’t object to the speculation; just the one-sided nature of the speculation — as if it were in some way indecent to have someone suggest that the war would be over by the end of next week and very few people would be killed. . . .

This is the result of institutionalised political correctness; every bit as corrupting as institutionalised racism. It is the result of seminars and workshops (I remember them well) where journalists are instructed time and again that the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly are bloody important and don’t you dare suggest that they aren’t.

Yes, journalism could do with fewer seminars, and more actual reporting. And not just at the BBC.

UPDATE: Reader Chris Thornton thinks its worth noting that:

Up until a couple of months ago, Rod Liddle was the editor of the Today programme, the BBC’s flagship morning news show, which pretty much sets the daily agenda for British broadcasters. He knows what he’s talking about.

Good point. But will anyone listen?

WANT FRESH BLOGGY GOODNESS? Drop over to this week’s Carnival of the Vanities, and enjoy its new, graphic approach.

MORE GUNS, NO DIFFERENCE? Mark Kleiman suggests that rates of legal gun-carrying neither increase nor decrease crime, not least because they neither increase nor decrease overall gun-carrying much.

I don’t know what to make of this, but in my area — where gun-carrying, legal or otherwise, is high — I’ve been told by law-enforcement people that (1) a very high percentage of the populace, perhaps a third, carries guns on its person or in the car; and (2) that the permitting law caused a small number of those people to get permits, and a small number of people who never carried before to do so, to no great effect overall. I don’t know how they know this (but I’ve heard the same estimate independently from several cops, so they at least think they know it), and the number seems high to me — but then, I’m a professor and my friends, only some of whom carry guns, are probably not representative. Around here, though, it seems possible that changes in gun-carrying laws haven’t changed behavior much. But it seems likely that they would make a bigger difference in jurisdictions where laws on the subject were more vigorously enforced.

What’s interesting here, though, is that the “bloodbath” and “Dodge City” predictions made by opponents of liberalized weapons laws have not borne fruit anywhere.

UPDATE: Reader John Kent emails:

I disagree with Mark Kleiman. As long as criminals understand that their intended victims may be carrying a weapon, this is usually enough to prevent a lot of their intended criminal activity. Just look what is happening in England. The criminals know the populace is now unarmed and the crime rate has climbed. I don’t have to actually carry a gun in order to benefit from the law. By having the concealed weapon law on the books, the criminals now know that I’m part of a “pack”, and not just another member of a “herd”.

I don’t know what the crime statistics show for the states that now allow the legal carrying of guns, but I have to believe that the overall perception of the population is that they “feel” safer. Individuals are now able to protect themselves, and not just rely on the state to keep them from harm.

Well, I agree — and on a societal level, recent experience in Britain and Australia, where crime has gone up after firearms confiscations, would seem to suggest that. My point was merely that concealed-carry laws are likely to have a modest effect on crime because they have a modest effect on behavior. If you required law-abiding citizens to carry guns, you’d probably see a greater decrease in crime, because that would be a greater change in behavior. And if you confiscated all guns, you’d probably see a significant increase in crime, because, again, that would be a major change. Complicating these things, of course, is that anti-gun legislation seems correlated with a decreased interest in enforcing laws against actual criminals (again, see Britain) and with a general opposition to self-defense whether armed or not (ditto) and vice versa, and those societal attitudes and changes in official behavior have an impact, too.

That’s my take anyway, though I claim no special expertise on the criminological aspects. My scholarship is all in the area of the Second Amendment, and I’m on record as saying that, for Second Amendment purposes, these kinds of considerations are not significant, just as I regard the contentious issue of whether pornography leads to more rape as unimportant for First Amendment purposes.

A WHILE BACK I suggested that some countries might take the hint that the U.S. victory in Iraq meant that dictatorial regimes were at special risk. Apparently, some people have noticed:

Tehran, May 7, IRNA — Some 154 members of the parliament on Wednesday called on the Foreign Ministry to adopt active diplomacy to restore relations with the United States as a “deterrent approach” to possible threats. . . .

Comparing the popularity of the Islamic Republic of Iran with
the Iraqi 30-year-old dictatorship and Iran’s eight-year sacred
defense against the Iraqi-imposed war, the statement said that the
Iraqi people did not defend their country against the coalition
invasion because they no longer were willing that their national
wealth being put at Saddam’s disposal.

“We believe that the progress and bright prospects will be available with safeguarding the territorial integrity, independence, freedom and the Islamic Republic and that no excuse is acceptable to ignore our recommendation,” the reformist MPs said.

The ripples spread. Read this, too.

NANOTECHNOLOGY IN LIVING CELLS: Derek Lowe calls it unstoppable. Very interesting post.

MORE ON THE TOTALFINAELF CORRUPTION CASE:

An Iraqi-born British billionaire told a French court yesterday how he had paid millions of pounds in kickbacks to French oil executives. . . .

Sweating profusely in the heat of the packed courtroom at the Palais de Justice he confirmed that his company received the money and, more extraordinarily, that 1.4bn pesetas was paid back to Elf, or rather to the senior executives who had set up the deal.

This massive retro-commission, more commonly known as a kickback, first found its way into the bank account of Alfred Sirven, then Elf’s head of special operations, and was then distributed in chunks to various other executives, including the company’s president, Loik le Flock-Prigent.

Both Sirven and Le Flock-Prigent have already received prison sentences for their roles in the Elf affair.

Constantly mopping his brow with his handkerchief, Auchi stated that he was told by Elf representatives that the deal would be “good for Elf and good for France”.

Indeed.

TESTING EXPERT KIMBERLY SWYGERT has more on the Bar Exam misgrading story. Money quote: “I’m not aware of any other large-scale testing program in which an error on the part of the testing company could ever result in scores being changed in a way that disadvantaged the test taker – not after scores were released.”

MALARIABLOGGING is an occasional InstaPundit feature from way back. Now there’s news of a possible genetic breakthrough against mosquitoes that carry malaria.

Question: If we could wipe ‘em all out, should we? It would save a lot of lives — and prevent a huge amount of misery. On the other hand, lots of things eat mosquitoes, and they might die off if the mosquitoes did, though perhaps other, nonmalarial mosquitoes would just step in to fill the niche.

Meanwhile here’s yet another promising malaria vaccine candidate — but we’ve had rather a lot of those. And malaria may be making a comeback in Europe. Ugh. I wonder if it was the dreaded transmission via mail that caused this. . . .

HR 766, THE HOUSE NANOTECHNOLOGY BILL, HAS PASSED: Declan McCullagh has a link-rich story on CNET. Here’s another story from Small Times, and here’s one from the Mercury News.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT in John Ashcroft’s America. When will this madness stop?

AHEM:

Rather I should die a thousand times, and see old Glory in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours be degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.

Sheesh. What was this guy smoking?

UPDATE: Roger Simon is pretty hard on Robert Byrd: “This man shouldn’t be in the US Senate. He should be in a soup kitchen for the homeless doing penance.”

True enough. But I was really twitting TAPPED (that’s the “smoking” link) for holding him up as a role model for Democrats. It’s like holding Strom Thurmond up as a role model for Republicans. And that would be wrong.

ACTUALLY, IT IS A DISEASE:

I knew that the wave of anti-Americanism that would swell up after the Iraq war would make me feel ill. And it has. It has made me much, much more ill than I had expected.

My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness.

Hey, we don’t call it “anti-American bile” for nothing. But admitting to the disease is the first step toward getting help.

UPDATE: Reader Gregory Taylor emails:

Hi Glenn. She vents: “A nation that can paint those faces on death machines must be insane.” Well, apparently we learned that little trick from the famously insane Royal Air Force in World War 2. See: Link “The famous “shark’s teeth” marking did not originate with the Flying Tigers, but was adapted from the markings used by the Tomahawks of the RAF’s No. 112 Squadron in North Africa.”

Actually, it’s the deep loathing for Coca-cola that is the true sign of insanity. Though, personally, I’d like to see smiley-faces and “PLUR” painted on all our death machines. As with the Medes’ babyface makeup, the incongruity would probably unnerve our foes.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT, as the Daily Cal is shut down by people who don’t like its exercise of free speech. No doubt Tim Robbins will be sounding off in its defense any moment now.

AFGHAN UPDATE: The Taliban are trying for a comeback. This is nuisance-level stuff, but (as Osama would have realized if he hadn’t suffered delusions of grandeur), nuisance-level stuff is in some ways more effective than big, splashy attacks.

The way you beat it is to show that people who side with the bad guys don’t prosper, and people who side with you do. That takes patience and close attention. Are we providing that in Afghanistan? I don’t know. Here’s a not-very-encouraging story from the Christian Science Monitor.

I think that Afghanistan was relegated to holding-action status during the Iraq buildup because attention was on Iraq. But, you know, it shouldn’t stay in holding-action status because attention is on Iraqi reconstruction.

It’s likely, of course, that much of what goes on in Afghanistan has to do with various diplomatic efforts involving Iran (which is surely stirring up trouble there) and Pakistan (which is likely doing the same). Russia and China are likely interested in seeing that things don’t go too smoothly there, too. I don’t pretend to know what’s going on, but the Administration needs to make sure that someone does, and that we’re providing sufficient resources to get the job done.

UPDATE: Here’s more from Daniel Drezner.

COULD THE NEXT SECRETARY-GENERAL OF NATO be a pro-American Norwegian woman? She even does cheesecake in American-flag gear. (Well, sort of.)

Sounds good to me.

HE WASN’T READY TO DECLARE WAR ON SADDAM, but “antiwar” MP George Galloway is declaring “war” on Tony Blair.

Hmm. Maybe Blair should have just paid him off — though, by all accounts, he doesn’t come cheap.

DAVID PLOTZ OFFERS SEVEN SUGGESTIONS FOR REBUILDING IRAQ: The Oil Trust idea is one of them. Read ‘em all.

RADLEY BALKO IS CONTRASTING conservatives’ treatment of the Rick Santorum and Bill Bennett affairs.

And, to continue his hypocrisy-busting activities, he also points out a “living wage” group that’s shafting its employees.

NOW HERE’S A PILOT WHO KNOWS HOW TO REASSURE PASSENGERS! Well, I’d be comforted.

RAIDERS OF THE LOST TALMUD: “Somewhere, Noam Chomsky is writing his next book.” And it’s coauthored by OSCAR!

(Sorry, I was channeling Walter Monheit there for a moment).

I’VE GOT SOME THOUGHTS on the Ninth Circuit and the right to bear arms, over at GlennReynolds.com.

Sorry that blogging has been so slow — I’m home with a sick kid today.

AUSTIN BAY LOOKS AT the search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

UGH: A grading screwup on the Multistate Bar Exam.

DAVID APPELL SPANKS BILL MCKIBBEN:

McKibben makes no real argument why we should stop now except that he likes his life, his running, his humanity just the way it is now. But many people do not have McKibben’s life. Some, instead, live a life of great physical pain for which medicine has no answers, or mental torment for which psychology offers no solution. Billions yearn to live at the standard McKibben lives, yet doing with today’s technology–even our best technology–would wre[a]k havoc on the planet. Yet McKibben has the audacity to say that our answers can be found in the world as it exists today, as if scientists, engineers, policy makers, and technologists just haven’t been trying hard enough?

McKibben, I believe, would be making this argument whenever he happened to be alive — 5,000 B.C., a century ago, or two thousand years from now. Preying on fears sells news, articles, and books, and offers a shot at piety at the same time. Finding real honest-to-god solutions does not do as well.

Read the whole thing.

THIS SOUNDS WORSE THAN GUANTANAMO — so how come nobody’s been howling about it?

Some of the last 59 Iraqi soldiers to be held in Iran, out of 60,000 captured, had been imprisoned for more than two decades without communication with the outside world. “Saddam gone?” one former prisoner asked.

He was dressed in a lime green sports jacket that hung from his thin shoulders, the new clothes a parting gift from his Iranian captors. As he stood, he swayed, and then said, “I’m sorry. I have psychological damage in my brain.” . . .

Hassan’s hands trembled so severely that he could not light a cigarette without help from a comrade. He said he was tortured routinely — forced to squat for hours, beaten with lengths of cable and rope, shocked by car batteries and had what he thinks was dirty water injected with a syringe into his penis. . . .

Hassan, who was sent to the front for what his superiors in the police department promised would be a three-month tour of duty, described his daily rations: “Four spoons of rice. A half cup of water. A piece of bread.”

He said he saw hundreds of prisoners die, most from diseases like dysentery and tuberculosis, others from heart attacks. One of the camps had previously been a stable for animals, he said.

I don’t recall any of that happening at Guantanamo, which has gotten a lot more condemnation from the human-rights establishment. And don’t bother sending me a link to a press release somewhere. They “go on record” deploring this sort of stuff. But they don’t launch major PR offensives about it. And that’s because complaining about this sort of brutality doesn’t get donors to open their wallets. Criticizing the United States does.

And that’s a form of corruption, no less than oil contracts are.

SALAM PAX IS BACK: Or at least, there’s a new post on his blog. He was blogging while Internet access was down, and has delivered a bunch of posts to Diana Moon, which are now posted.

UPDATE: [Previous item removed, at Diana Moon's request. I disagree, as I don't think keeping Salam's parents in the doubt about his sexual orientation is in the same category as protecting him from the secret police, but I've done it.]

AIR TRAVEL UPDATE: My flights to and from Palo Alto went fine. Security was okay at this end, but at San Jose’s Norm Mineta International Airport it was just about what you’d expect at an airport named for underperformin’ Norman: slow, with long lines, and screeners who didn’t seem very good.

Now a colleague who travels a lot — a big Democrat, by the way, not a government-hating conservative — just stopped by my office to rant about having to wait in a long line only to see, when she got to the gate area, 17 (she counted) uniformed TSA agents sitting in chairs watching the NBA playoffs.

She said she wished she’d had a digital camera with her so that I could post the picture. Me too.

UPDATE: This happened in Austin, Texas, for those who are wondering.

EUGENE VOLOKH is pointing out the difference between statistics and lies.

IT’S A HOWELL RAINES FEEDING FRENZY: Stephen F. Hayes is accusing the New York Times of deliberately getting things wrong in its coverage of Iraq.

And Donald Luskin is stalking Paul Krugman — claiming that Krugman is feeling the heat over errors in his columns (Luskin calls them “lies”), but still blowing smoke. Luskin has lots of quotes and links.

Meanwhile, the Times itself is reporting that the Baghdad looting story was false:

A top British Museum official said yesterday that his Iraqi counterparts told him they had largely emptied display cases at the National Museum in Baghdad months before the start of the Iraq war, storing many of the museum’s most precious artifacts in secure “repositories.”

The official, John E. Curtis, curator of the Near East Collection at the British Museum, who recently visited Iraq, said Baghdad museum officials had taken the action on the orders of Iraqi government authorities. When looting started, most of the treasures apparently remaining in display halls were those too large or bulky to have been moved for protection, Mr. Curtis said. . . .

Such measures would mirror actions taken in Iraq before the Persian Gulf war in 1991, primarily as a protection against bombing of Baghdad.

Mr. Curtis’s remarks may help explain recent reports by both Iraqi officials and American authorities that losses at the National Museum are less extensive than previously feared. For instance, Col. Matthew F. Bogdanos, a Marine reservist who is investigating the looting, said recently that Baghdad museum officials had listed only 25 artifacts as definitely missing.

So this happened in 1991, and nobody bothered to check to see if it had happened again? Why? Because they were too anxious to find a story that would make Rumsfeld look bad? It looks that way to me. There seems to be a bit of smoke-blowing here, too, as the Times now says that an undetermined number of never-cataloged items may have been stolen from the basement.

But we were told that 170,000 priceless antiquities had been looted. (Ken Layne has a nice post here.) Now the number of items considered important enough to catalog is 25. Rand Simberg’s earlier prediction that this would turn into another bogus story along “Jenin massacre” lines is looking pretty good.

The Times fired Jayson Blair for plagiarism. But at least plagiarists write things that are probably true.

UPDATE: A reader notes that the Times story I quote above was buried on page 20. No surprise there. Meanwhile Jim Miller notes his early and repeated skepticism of the looting story early on. And, for what it’s worth, Jonathan Foreman reports that claims that the Oil Ministry was guarded while the museum was ignored are bogus.

UPDATE: And now it’s Maureen Dowd who’s being savaged for leaving out some crucial truths.

ANOTHER UPDATE: And don’t miss this piece from the Washington City Paper about the NYT’s sniper coverage.

Hmm. Scandals, inaccuracies, falling circulation, and declining influence. Sounds like bad news to me. How long can Raines last?

MICKEY KAUS on Stephen Glass’s new novel:

So Glass writes non-fiction and it’s fiction, and he writes fiction and it’s non-fiction! The man’s a transgressive genius. Subtly subverting all Western literary categories! … I’d say the “it’s all performance art” defense is still open. Glass must be playing a deep Kinbote-like game. The book can’t be as flat and cheesy as it sounds.

Heh.

NANOTECHNOLOGY VISIONS: My TechCentralStation column is up with a report from the Foresight Institute conference, and it features exclusive video interviews with Larry Lessig, Eric Drexler, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA, Science Comm.) and more. I knew that being an A/V geek would come in handy eventually. . . .

THIS is kind of embarrassing:

Canadian soldiers are back in Afghanistan, but this time, they don’t have any weapons to help protect them. In Ottawa’s rush to put Canadian troops on the ground, 25 elite Canadian soldiers arrived in Afghanistan only to find that they are not allowed to carry guns. What makes the situation particularly embarrassing is that the troops have been assigned German bodyguards to protect them. A Global National exclusive report.

Ouch.

“LIKE DOONESBURY, BUT FUNNY:” Here’s a story on Chris Muir’s excellent Day by Day strip, which is finally starting to get the attention it deserves.

JOHN LEO WRITES about an anti-war protester who seems to have been unjustly hassled by the Secret Service.

This has been a problem for a while. I think that it started after Reagan was shot, and it seems to have gotten steadily worse over the years. And the Secret Service seems to have serious management problems, something that I’ve noted here before. Leo’s right, though, to note that this is a problem that goes beyond the Secret Service.

ARUNDHATI ROY, ENVIRONMENTAL MENACE: Jayakrishnan Nair has the story.

HEH. Indeed.

KEN LAYNE NOTICES SOMETHING:

The New York Times’ circulation fell 5.3 percent, nearly triple the drop of the next biggest loser (the Washington Post at 1.92 percent). In six months, the NYT’s weekday circulation dropped by more than 60,000 copies. That means the number of papers sold dropped by an average of 10,000 every month between October 2002 and March 2003.

This was not exactly a slow news period: North Korea admitted it had a nuclear weapons program, the D.C. sniper was on the loose, a French tanker was attacked off the coast of Yemen, terrorists killed hundreds in Bali and the Philippines, Republicans swept mid-term elections (save for the Democratic sweep in California), ANSWER led protests around the world, “Old Europe” fought its last battle, there were massive anti-mullah demonstrations in Iran, Trent Lott went down, UN weapons inspectors went nowhere, Venezuela went crazy, Columbia didn’t make it home, the Axis of Weasels was exposed, everybody got worked up about a nightclub fire, there was that little War in Iraq, etc.

Of course the NYT was mostly busy whining about a golf tournament ….

The New York Post saw its circulation grow.