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 unel