THE PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS is reportedly running a story on Flight 93 tomorrow that points to some timing discrepancies in the cockpit voice recorder data. You can read an advance posting here. I’m rather skeptical of the various conspiracy theories that have been swirling around the Net of late, but there have been some unaccounted-for details.

Thanks to Stuart Buck for emailing the link.

UPDATE: The story is online now.

READER ROBERT PATTERSON SENDS this story of tourists mistaken for terrorists that’s worth a read.

THIS HEADLINE makes it sound like a bad thing.

WILLIAM BURTON (whose permalinks aren’t working) has a message for the world:

Hi, World, how’s it going? Been a while. I know our current leader doesn’t call you much, but we really do like you. In fact, we’re a lot like you. Really. We’ve got Hindus, and Muslims, and Christians, and Jews, and people who believe in Body Thetans and the healing power of crystals. We’ve got Irish Buddhists, Japanese Baptists, and Jewish atheists who are trying to find a nice Jewish boy to settle down with. We’ve even got women who make a living travelling all over the place telling other women to stay home. All sorts of crazy shit. You’d love it over here. I know we told a lot of you to stay home, but you know we didn’t mean it. Ya’ll do most of the work around here anyway, except the stuff that involves typing (and that ain’t really work).

I know that some of the stuff we’ve been doing hasn’t been explained real well, so I thought I’d take a shot. Listen to me real good, now. We, the United States of America, don’t want to kill you or anyone else, nor do we want to piss you or anyone else off (well, maybe France). We’d prefer that everyone just keep sending us their smartest students and hardest workers while buying our soft drinks and watching our action movies. However, we are going to defend ourselves against attack and take steps to keep ourselves from being attacked. We also reserve the right to stick up for people who are getting slaughtered for no good reason at all. Don’t expect any different. Ever.

If we have to defend ourselves, people are going to die. Some of those people won’t deserve it. That’s just the nature of warfare. It’s real hard to sort the good guys from the bad guys when the bad guys are trying to keep from being sorted. So if we end up killing someone who didn’t deserve it or stationing troops near someone’s holy place, we’re genuinely not trying to be insensitive. We’re trying to do the best we can in an imperfect world. Believe me, we don’t like it when innocent people die. It’s not our nature.

You might mention to your leaders that you don’t want to get caught in any crossfire, so they need to make sure they don’t kill any Americans (’cause if they do kill any of us, there’s sure to be crossfire). If they seem intent on killing Americans anyway, you might try shooting your leaders in the head with an AK-47 or throwing them in prison. I know the Rumanians are awfully glad they shot theirs, and the Serbians don’t seem too upset that theirs are in jail. I know you don’t always have that option, and you may be stuck with the scumbags you’ve got. If so, our condolences. But your beef is with them, not with us.

There’s more.

RICH HAILEY reflects on America.

IT’S NOT JUST Florida. Maybe it just gets noticed there.

UPDATE: Oh, this hurts. Or maybe that’s just my eyes burning from the sulfuric acid vapors.

WHIGGING OUT purports to find a Democrats/Al Qaeda connection based on the Buffalo Five all being registered Democrats. Seems a bit of a stretch to me. I think that his real point is more along these lines:

After Oklahoma City, Republicans were forced to dress in sackcloth and ashes and parade around as if people who wanted tax cuts and limited government helped load explosives into McVeigh’s truck. While there was of course no connection between the GOP and McVeigh, the argument for the abovementioned Islamic/Democratic connection is far more compelling, and needs to be examined without fear of appearing conspiratorial.

He’s right about the way McVeigh was used — there’s an interesting discussion of it in George Stephanopoulos’ White House memoir, which reports that Dick Morris was behind it, and wanted to do even more.

After the Hilliard, McKinney, and McKinney defeats, though, I don’t think many Democrats are going to be doing anything that might make them look close to Al Qaeda or radical Islam in general.

UPDATE: Oliver Willis emails to say that he’s surprised I gave credence to the Democrats / Al Qaeda connection. Hmm. I thought I was debunking it. I don’t even think that Whigging Out means it seriously. I saw him (I think it’s a him) as using the opportunity to twit the Dems for how Dick Morris used McVeigh — and there’s nothing imaginary about that.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Whigging Out has posted a clarification.

IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE ORWELLIAN, AND MAYBE RACIST when the United States talked about fingerprinting immigrants from Arab countries. But now Saudi Arabia wants to require visitors to wear radio ID tags.

COMBAT WEBLOGGING: Yep. This is a weblog from some U.S. soldiers in the ‘stans.

MARTIN DEVON isn’t a multiculturalist.

BLOGOSPHERE FAVORITE ROBERT FISK has a column mentioning Hanan Ashrawi’s speech. Damian Penny responds.

UPDATE: Misha has some comments, too. Meanwhile Tim Blair points out what happens when you hire John Pilger.

JOSHUA TREVINO is claiming vindication.

SO FAR, WE’RE STILL ALIVE. Well, actually it’s not bad, though you can smell the stuff in the air. We had a nice dinner down in the Old City, though. My daughter is eagerly chasing rumors that her school will be closed tomorrow.

JOHN WEIDNER SAYS that Sweden is on the road to extinction. Except for his Swedish relatives, of course.

TOM MAGUIRE has a post responding to my post below on the Central Park jogger case, and various other bloggers’ commentary on it. And reader George Zachar sends this first-hand account:

Away from the suddenly nighmarish legal turn in the Central Park Jogger case, I want you to know there really was terror, in the pre-9/11 sense, in the park that night.

I was jogging up the west side of the reservoir just past 9:30 pm when an approaching runner began gesturing frantically for me to turn around.

As he passed me, he said there was a gang of kids attacking joggers at the northern end of the reservoir, and that he’d just barely escaped them. I, of course, turned south and ran to the nearest park exit.

When I saw the next morning’s papers, I learned the man who’d warned me was a former track star whose speed had saved him. And that if I had left my apartment 10 minutes earlier, reaching the reservoir’s apex before him, *I* would have been a victim, with no chance of eluding the wilding youths.

Just offering a local, non-legal perspective to the events of that night.

I may post more on this later. I’ve gotten some email charging me with being unfairly biased against prosecutors, and I’m trying to decide whether to respond with some anecdotes from my time working in a prosecutor’s office or not.

UPDATE: Here’s more on the subject, with the amusing title “Central Park Bloggers.”

SMALLPOX UPDATE: The U.S. government appears to be planning a rolling vaccination program that will probably reach the general public eventually. I suspect that public pressure may move that timeline up.

I’M AT THE OFFICE, and my wife just called to say that a train wreck and chemical spill may cause an evacuation of our neighborhood. Jeez.

UPDATE: So far, it looks like we’re in the clear. However, our plans for a birthday party tonight have been scrubbed. Dang.

ANOTHER UPDATE: They’ve expanded the evac. area. Still not quite to our house, but my wife and daughter are meeting me down here, and we’re going out to dinner while they work on the cleanup. Here’s the latest, for the two or three of you who may actually care.

N.Z. BEAR points out bias in an Associate Press story on antiwar protests by Angela Watercutter — though, to be fair, the bias could have been injected by an editor. Wouldn’t be the first time that happened.

UPDATE: Brian Carnell isn’t very happy with UPI, either. And nobody likes Reuters. Hmm. I’m beginning to sense a more general problem. . . .

READER BRIAN JONES WRITES:

Q: “What’s the quickest way to shut Noam Chomsky up?”

A: “Ask him a linguistics question.”

Thankyouverymuch.

Someone should try this.

ORRIN JUDD writes that Jonah Goldberg doesn’t understand the Internet. Well, kind of.

KEN LAYNE’S WEIRD FILES SYNDICATED FEATURE is taking off! Encourage your paper to pick it up.

JEFFREY ROSEN WRITES THAT CHECKS AND BALANCES ARE WORKING:

In the course of researching the state of liberty and security after 9/11, I’ve been especially struck by how restrained America’s legal response appears when contrasted with that of our European allies. Although they weren’t directly attacked, the countries of the European Union passed anti-terrorism measures during the past year that are far more sweeping than anything adopted in the United States. In October, France expanded the powers of the police to search private property without a warrant. Germany has engaged in religious profiling of suspected terrorists, a practice that was upheld in a court challenge. In Britain, which has become a kind of privacy dystopia, Parliament passed a sweeping anti-terrorism law in December that authorizes a central government authority to record and store all communications data generated by e-mail, Internet browsing or other electronic communications, and to make the data available to law enforcement without a court order. In May, the European Union authorized all of its members to pass similar laws requiring data retention.

The Bush administration has tried to emulate its European allies by expanding executive authority in similarly dramatic ways. It asserted that the president may designate citizens or aliens as enemy combatants and detain them indefinitely without judicial review. It claimed that the president may deport certain aliens based on secret hearings whose existence is withheld from the pressand the public. And it attempted to blur the legal lines that separate domestic law enforcement from foreign intelligence gathering, transforming the FBI into the equivalent of Britain’s domestic security intelligence agency, MI5.

What distinguished America from Europe, however, is how quickly all three of these extreme positions met with opposition from the other two branches of government.

Jeffrey Rosen has been thinking deeply about these issues since well before 9/11/2001 and this piece is well worth reading — as, I expect, his book on this subject will be.

SECOND-GENERATION ASTROTURF? RegulateGuns.Org is a website that argues that guns should be regulated as a consumer product. (By which they really mean guns should be regulated out of existence). The contact page indicates that it’s related to the Consumer Federation of America, though it’s not clear whether the site is actually part of CFA or if CFA is just a “supporter” of the site. But the WhoIs entry says that the domain name is registered to the Violence Policy Center.

I couldn’t find any mention of a VPC connection, and entering “violence policy center” into the site’s search engine produced no results, so apparently VPC isn’t mentioned anywhere. And when I entered “regulateguns.org” in the search window on the Consumer Federation of America site, I got no returns. I got the same non-result when I searched the Violence Policy Center’s site.

So who’s actually behind this?

UPDATE: FYI, courtesy of an alert reader, here’s an article on what it would actually mean to treat guns like a common consumer product. Oh, and another reader points out that searching for “VPC” does bring up some links to the Violence Policy Center.

HERE’S A REPORT on the Florida non-terror inicident that’s worth reading. Excerpt:

Friday’s coverage was the source of a staggering amount of misinformation. Among the inaccurate reports:

• Several stations reported that a woman in Georgia told police three Middle Easterners were coming to Miami to blow something up. (That’s not what she said.)

• Several also said cops spotted the men after they roared past a tollbooth on I-75. (One car rolled by at a normal rate of speed; the other stopped and paid the tolls for both.)

• The cops used explosives to detonate a suspicious knapsack found in one car. (They didn’t.) Channel 7 reported that explosive ”triggers” were found in one of the cars. (There were no ”triggers” or anything else to do with explosives.)

• Channel 7 also reported that cops were searching for a third car. (They weren’t.)

It was a wretched performance — worse yet, a wretched performance that dragged on for eight hours, terrorizing South Florida and smearing the daylights out of three medical students who can be counted on to contribute heavily to the next edition of the travel guide What Sucks About South Florida.

”This is what is wrong with local news,” said Bill Pohovey, news director at WPLG-ABC 10, one of the two stations that kept their perspective on the story and stuck with regular programming. (WLTV-Univision 23 was the other.) “This is why viewers get disgusted with local news.”

My only quibble with Pohovey is the word local. The worst parody of journalism Friday was actually on CNN, where the high-paid-low-rated anchor Paula Zahn speculated, without a jot or tittle of evidence, that the three men were coming to Florida to blow up the Turkey Point nuclear reactor. Now you know why CNN promotes her sex appeal rather than her news judgment.

Sounds like what Reid Stott was saying. And mainline journalists say bloggers are sloppy?

YEAH, I KNOW: Not many posts so far today (though several updates to yesterday’s stuff — scroll down). I’ve spent a lot of family time and only got a little bit of time at the computer while my daughter was occupied playing Barbies. More later, though I have to finish up two columns for this week, which may limit posting somewhat. In the meantime, PunditWatch should be up later this afternoon.