SAUDI WARNINGS ABOUT OKLAHOMA CITY? Padilla / Al Muhajir got himself arrested on purpose? Bryan Preston is following some interesting stuff. I don’t know how much credence to put in some of these stories, but he’s definitely found some troubling reports.

UPDATE: Rand Simberg has some things to say about why we should have kept Timothy McVeigh alive.

HERE’S ANOTHER INTERESTING ITEM on the Oklahoma City / Iraq connection.

SLASHDOT REPORTS that NPR is reconsidering its deep-linking policy, apparently in response to all the critical emails.

UPDATE: Eric Olsen has much, much more on this.

BRAD DE LONG takes on anticipatory schadenfreude about the economy. (Paul Musgrave says De Long should be the top econoblogger in the Blogosphere, and he is pretty good.)

The piece that he takes down is by William Greider in The Nation, and what Greider seems to hope to get out of 15% unemployment is an end to U.S. “boastfulness.” Is it just me, or is keeping the United States from feeling good about, well, anything, but especially itself the main consistent theme of the Nation crowd? And why is that, exactly?

SFSU UPDATE: Wow, there’s been a real development! Armed Liberal reports that the Palestinian group was defunded and suspended for a year because of its role in last month’s riot. The Jewish group whose protest was the target of the assault, however, was given a “warning,” which I think can be put down to an effort to seem evenhanded.

I’m delighted to see some action, that bogus touch aside. But I’d still like to see the videotapes made public.

JIM BENNETT says it’s time to bring Echelon in from the cold.

UPDATE: Bennett’s column has been picked up on Slashdot.

SFSU UPDATE: Meryl Yourish, who’s SFSU central, reports that SFSU has taken down the Palestinian students’ University website, apparently because of racism and hate speech.

I’d rather have seen them focus on the violent conduct of those folks.

UCSD UPDATE: Craig Schamp has more background, and points out that the problems with California universities have been building for a while.

EUGENE VOLOKH notes yet another poll showing widespread (73%) support for the Justice Department’s pro-individual-right position on the Second Amendment. Volokh thought the question on an earlier Zogby poll that showed 75% approval was doubtfully phrased and might have inflated the total, but he has no such criticism of this ABC News poll, which produced essentially the same result.

I recall a summer, 1995 U.S. News poll (taken during the post-Oklahoma-City antigun hypewave) that said 75% of the American public thinks the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to own a gun, so I suspect that this is probably about right.

Funny how little attention these poll numbers have gotten. If 75% of Americans had thought Ashcroft was wrong on this, do you think it would have gotten more coverage?

RETHINKING BRITISH GUN CONTROL? Not yet, really, but here is a sign that questions are at least being raised:

Self-defence, William Blackstone, the 18th century English jurist, wrote, is a natural right that no government can deprive people of, since no government can protect the individual in his moment of need. The English Bill of Rights of 1689 affirmed the right of individuals “to have arms for their defence”. It is a dangerous right. But leaving personal protection to the police is also dangerous, and ineffective. Government is perilously close to denying people the ability to protect themselves at all, and the result is a more, not less, dangerous society.

“It is implicit in a genuine right,” said Judge Brown-Wilkinson (Wheeler v Leicester City Council 1985 ) “that its exercise may work against [some facet of] the public interest: a right to speak only where its exercise advanced the public welfare or public policy would be a hollow guarantee against repression.”

History shows that public safety is not enhanced by depriving individuals of their right to personal safety.

Indeed.

RACHEL ALEXANDER wonders why the horrors of the Sudan aren’t getting much attention. She says it’s due to a combination of religious prejudice and racism. (Via Barabbas).

RON BAILEY lays out the arguments against a cloning ban. He’s right, of course.

FRANCE’S AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED STATES says that claims of French antisemitism are “slander.” Martin Devon says it’s not slander if it’s true.

I’m just glad that we’ve finally gotten their attention.

H.D. MILLER fact-checks claims of American massacres in Afghanistan, noting that even the makers admit they don’t actually have any, you know, evidence. Er, except that IndyMedia ignores that, as usual. And ignores evidence of real massacres before American troops arrived, too, because they’re not by, you know, Americans and so don’t count.

THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION is finally starting to notice that Cynthia McKinney’s donor base seems to be largely Arab and Arab-American — including national groups with links to terrorism.

BELLICOSE WOMEN UPDATE: Mary Zeiss Stange, who wrote the excellent Gun Women, talks about the cultural intolerance of academic feminism, She has some suggestions.

MICKEY KAUS joins with Peggy Noonan to make it a powerful two-pronged offensive against the term “homeland,” which I agree sounds creepy and dumb.

He also disses women’s soccer, and calls Charles Peters the first blogger. Something for everyone!

Note to Mickey: By that definition, the first blogger was Malcolm S. Forbes, with his “Fact and Comment” column, which predates “Tilting at Windmills” by decades.

If you sent me an email that required a reply, and haven’t gotten one, well, I’ll try to get back to you this weekend. If you don’t hear from me by Monday, it means that I didn’t realize that your email required a reply, because my eyes were glazed from reading hundreds before yours.

When I go on vacation, I think I’m just going to block the account to new mail. I can’t imagine what a week’s worth would be like!

BOY, this Los Angeles Times writer, Tim Rutten, doesn’t like blogs very much. He thinks we should be reading “serious newspapers” instead. That wouldn’t include the Los Angeles Times, whose sloppy and biased Israel coverage has produced a boycott — and which, judging by its lame-ass registration requirement, doesn’t want anyone reading it (on the Web, at least) anyway.

THE SPOONS EXPERIENCE is sporting a new, Stacy Tabb design. Boy the Blogosphere is sure getting prettier thanks to Stacy.

More posting later — my daughter just got back in from the pool, and it’s Harry Potter time. In the meantime, keep yourselves informed with this story about 3000 Iranians in Denmark protesting the EU’s support for Iran’s terrorist regime: “‘By investing in religious fascism ruling Iran, EU is not just letting down its own moral and political values, but is putting its money on a losing horse,’ Mohadessin said.”

UCSD UPDATE: Looks like the whole UCSD action against the satire magazine was a setup by University officials who wanted to punish it, using the racist, antisemitic hate group Mecha as a tool. Unfortunately, one of the participants failed to grasp the significance of the “reply all” button, and the word got out.

When is somebody going to clean house in California’s higher education system? Looks like there’s a lot of housecleaning to do.

I’M BACK. Too much construction on the 400+ mile drive from Memphis to Knoxville. But the only thing worse than a state that’s always working on the roads is a state that’s NOT always working on the roads.

NOW THIS IS INTERESTING:

WASHINGTON –– Just weeks before Timothy McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, U.S. intelligence and law enforcement received several warnings that Islamic terrorists were seeking to strike on American soil and that a likely target was government buildings, documents show.

The information, though it was never linked to McVeigh, was stark enough that the Clinton administration urged stepped up security patrols and screening at federal buildings nationwide, including those in Oklahoma.

The government, however, didn’t fortify buildings with cement barriers like those hurriedly installed after McVeigh detonated his explosive-laden truck at the curb of the Murrah building on April 19, 1995, officials said.

Islamic extremists are determined to “strike inside the U.S. against objects symbolizing the American government in the near future,” said one warning obtained by The Associated Press.

I don’t think this is getting as much attention as it deserves. I hope that someone is looking into it.

PALESTINIAN CULTURE is becoming a psychotic death cult. This is beginning to worry even some Palestinians.

It should. Whole cultures do go crazy from time to time. The results are usually bad for their neighbors and worse for them.

PAUL TRUMMEL UPDATE: Bill Hobbs has the latest. Sadly, Trummel, an old man who has already spent several months in jail, has given in — though there’s a mirror site with all the information that Judge James Doerty ordered him to take down. (Doerty finally took down the “guestbook” feature of his reelection website, too.)

While the usual “see the violence inherent in the system” antiwar crowd has been screaming loudly about being repressed, just about everyone outside the warblogger crowd has been ignoring this genuine case of free speech being suppressed, in clear violation of the First Amendment.

Anybody know who’s running against Judge James Doerty and how I can send him/her some money?