HOSNI MUBARAK experiences Condi’s displeasure.

FORGET TED RALL’S CHALLENGE, which seems to be bogus anyway, as he’s bouncing the emails: Tom Maguire is running a more constructive contest.

UPDATE: Heh: “Ah, yes, Ted. Forgotten, but not gone.”

D’OH! I forgot to post a link to this week’s Blog Mela earlier. Be sure to check it out.

UPDATE: And here’s a look at the Indian economy. Also, don’t miss this South Asia roundup from Winds of Change.

ANDREW SULLIVAN on Gannon-Guckert: “The real scandal is the blatant use of homophobic rhetoric by the self-appointed Savonarolas of homo-left-wingery. It’s an Animal Farm moment: the difference between a fanatic on the gay left and a fanatic on the religious right is harder and harder to discern.”

UPDATE: Heh: “The NY Times has lost interest for now, but maybe the Right can keep this scandal alive a bit longer.”

RATHERGATE UPDATE: Mary Murphy, one of the RatherGate producers, has resigned.

JIM BENNETT’S BOOK gets a favorable review (except for some criticism of his prose style) in Foreign Affairs, from Walter Russell Mead.

HEH. I guess the ratings strategy hasn’t worked out as planned.

MY EARLIER MENTION OF Osama bin Laden targets produced this email (with photos) from readers Peyton and Debbie Randolph:

We’ve got one on our garage wall!

At the Protest Warrior get-together in January, here in Austin, one of the activities was visiting a local outdoor range. We did OK, not our best. The hits are at 7 meters with her Browning Hi-Power 9mm and my HK Mark 23 .45, also pictured.

I like the photos. And, you know, when I posted the link this morning, I thought: “Yeah, I think the Osama target is cool, but will any InstaPundit readers care about something like this?”

I should have known better than to worry . . . .

UPDATE: A veritable army of readers has emailed to complain about the poor firearms safety demonstrated in this photo (fingers should be on triggers only to shoot!). Well, yes, but I’m prepared to make an exception for a photo-op like this one, where the firearms appear to be pointed safely. But don’t try this at home kids — or on the range!

TSUNAMI PHOTOS recovered from a dead couple’s digital camera.

MORE COMPLAINTS about WikiPedia.

UPDATE: More here.

I’M NOT SURE THAT THIS KNIFE HOLDER, sent by a reader, is quite my, um, idiom. But I have to admit, it’s more interesting than this one.

POLIPUNDIT RESPONDS to a challenge from Ted Rall.

UPDATE: More from John Hawkins.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Still more, from Jon Henke. And still more, here. This challenge is no challenge at all . . . .

YALE LAW PROFESSOR PETER SCHUCK weighs in against Yale’s exclusion of military recruiters:

Through his arguments, Schuck says that Law School opponents of the Defense Department’s recruitment policy have been acting in a contradictory manner. The Law School itself discriminates against white and Asian applicants through the affirmative action process, he said.

“It seems odd for the schools to insist that they may define merit in a way that disadvantages white, Asian and indeed straight applicants (if schools deem other minorities or gays ‘diversity enhancing’) but that the military may not define merit in a way that disadvantages gays,” Schuck writes in his article.

Another irony Schuck presents is that those same faculty members who filed suit against the Department of Defense do not oppose the federal government’s power to cut off funding from a university that itself discriminated, citing a case involving Bob Jones University in which law schools publicly opposed the government’s subsidization of an institution that discriminated against blacks.

Schuck stresses in his article that he favors barring discrimination against gays and protecting academic autonomy, but that students themselves should be able to decide if they want to enter the military.

“We should not reward or punish the choices of our students but encourage them to make their own moral choices as informed as they can be by us,” Schuck said.

Indeed.

JOSCHKA FISCHER IS IN TROUBLE, according to Der Spiegel.

WHAT HATH WARD CHURCHILL WROUGHT? Nothing good, in my opinion, but nothing surprising, either.

UPDATE: Come to think of it, I offered warnings and advice on this subject over three years ago.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Eugene Volokh notes that there’s more to this story than tenure. He’s right, but the big question is whether it’s politically viable for the academy to adopt a generally hostile and dismissive stance toward the larger society. Eugene is right, of course, that the First Amendment prevents even untenured people being fired simply for “anti-Americanism,” and he’s very right that academic freedom, given the political tenor of most campuses, does more to protect politically-incorrect people than the reverse. But in fact, and entirely apart from the fate of individual faculty members, state legislatures, boards of trustees, and alumni have a lot of power over universities if they choose to exercise it. They’ve mostly chosen to let academic administrators, and faculties, run universities without a lot of outside interference. But there’s no guarantee that this state of affairs will persist if those outsiders conclude that universities are being run badly.

ANN ALTHOUSE ON CONDI RICE, over at GlennReynolds.com:

Women with power easily unleash ideation about sex — and sex and power. If the woman can’t be contained by the thought that her powerfulness has removed her sexuality altogether, then the thought becomes that her sexuality has merged with her power. In the case of Condoleezza Rice, who has a high position of power and is distinctly attractive, she seems to become a strange new being — a superhero – like Neo in “The Matrix”!

Is it wrong to talk about powerful women this way? I say no. Image, fashion, and beauty are all important. And we certainly didn’t refrain from talking about how the male candidates for President looked in 2004. We obsessed over their ties, their hair and their makeup, and the bulges under their clothes. So go ahead and spout your theories about the meaning of Condoleezza Rice’s high-heeled boots.

Mine is: these boots are made for running for President.

We could do worse.

PATTERICO:

I have a very simple suggestion for mainstream media types who feel in any way threatened by bloggers: whenever you hear the word “blogger,” think: “reader.”

After all, bloggers who aren’t discussing your newspaper are irrelevant to you. And bloggers who are discussing your newspaper are simply part of your readership.

In other words, they’re your customers. And, while the customer may not always be right, the customer deserves to have his complaints heard.

The main difference between your readers who are bloggers and your other readers is that your blogging readers have a voice – one that you can’t entirely control. . . .

Once you realize that bloggers are your readers, it may help you be less dismissive of bloggers’ opinions.

Let’s hope.

SKBUBBA RESPONDS to the Slate piece comparing blogs and rap. Heh.

THERE’S LOTS OF HISTORY-BLOGGING, at the latest History Carnival.

HEH: Osama bin Laden targets for shooters.

ORANGE REVOLUTION REDUX:

BEIRUT — Presidents and diplomats piled on the pressure for Syria to withdraw its troops from Lebanon yesterday, but for the hard-line Ba’athist leaders in Damascus, the most worrisome pressure may be coming from a scruffy tent camp near the Beirut waterfront.

In a land where civil war is endemic but political protest is almost unknown, long-feuding Muslims, Christians and Druze are camping out just blocks from the parliament saying they will not leave until either Syrian troops leave their country or the government falls.

Rajan Rishyakaran has thoughts on what this might mean.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE RECIPES is up. Don’t miss it!

MORE TEDIOUS AND SELF-SERVING ATTACKS ON BLOGGERS: Second-string talk radio host Mike Gallagher has been attacking bloggers. Not surprisingly, it turns out that he has his own reasons for disliking the open entry of the blogosphere:

He has a blog. And it’s on the “Gallagher Gold” section — the part you must pay to access.

Though why anybody would pay $49.95/year to read it is beyond me. No wonder he doesn’t like the idea of people giving it away!

Then there’s this tiresome elitist schtick from Michael Gorman, the President of the American Library Association. Honestly, all this does is give ammunition to the people who say that libraries and librarians are obsolete in the digital age. I’ve always disagreed with that position — but if Mr. Gorman is a typical specimen I’ll have to rethink my stance, given that, judging by his comments, Gorman isn’t even very good at using Google.

UPDATE: Slashdot readers are comparing Gorman’s screed to a bad blog entry. And there are more comments here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Librarian Michael McHenry emails:

Gorman’s screed is another in the long list of reasons of why I refuse to be a member of the American Library Association – even though it’s my boss who would pay the dues. I am a rare breed, a librarian who is both male and conservative, and I use Google (and blogs) for my job every single day. As you suggested, if Mr. Gorman isn’t finding what he needs in Google, then he obviously isn’t using it correctly. And I wonder how he feels about the number of librarians and libraries who blog…

I’ve only worked in libraries for 10 years, so maybe the elitism won’t hit me until after another decade or two.

Heh. Well, my mother is a librarian, and she’s not that much of an elitist. Neither is librarian / blogger Mike the Librarian, who isn’t very impressed with Gorman’s take.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More still from another librarian:

I’m a former member of ALA, and I read your post about ALA President Gorman
with interest but little surprise. Yet another case of “Free speech for me but not for thee.” Mr. Gorman is / has been a member of ALA’s Social Responsibilities Roundtable, the political-activist arm of the organization. A couple of years ago, ALA and SRRT refused to stand up for political dissidents in Cuba, because the dissidents had dared to open “independent libraries” (in reality little more than small private collections of banned books) and referred to themselves as librarians (without benefit of the hallowed MLS – horrors!). The Castro government arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced over 20 people for this activity, and the ALA said not a peep. They took Castro at his word that the dissidents were “American agents”: Link

It meant more to the Association to be anti-US than pro-human-rights.

For me it was the height of irony that an organization that has a Freedom to Read Foundation, and that sponsors “Banned Books Week” here in the States, would not champion the freedom of non-Americans to read. This shameful episode convinced me once and for all that ALA Membership was not worth my hard-earned dollars. Many of my colleagues agreed; lots of us no longer belong to ALA because of their knee-jerk leftist politics.

Best,
A Carolina Librarian
(If you use this, I prefer that my name not be used, since my director’s in tight with the Big Guys at ALA).

Wow, chilling of dissent in the library world.

MORE: Yet another librarian chides Gorman.

NORM GERAS has thoughts on war and international law.

UPDATE: More on the subject, from Opinio Juris.

IAIN MURRAY IS blogging again.