JEFF COOPER isn’t big on the idea of arming flight attendants.

SOME INTERESTING ECONOMIC DATA at RobertPrather.com.

TEEN SEXUALITY: Judy Levine writes that she’s for it.

CLONING AND MORE: As I predicted earlier, the elusive Virginia Postrel has reappeared, with multiple cloning-related posts, and more! I like this aside:

Fiscal watchdogs should take a look at the “council staff and consultants” list, which demonstrates that a) this really was a jobs program for neocons, particularly Public Interest alums b) people in Washington expect an amazing amount of administrative assistance. The commission had an administrative director, an executive assistant, a staff assistant, and a receptionist/staff assistant. Haven’t these people ever heard of computers?

BRAD DELONG says the economic news isn’t so bad.

TURN IN A COP, GO TO JAIL: The guy who shot the video of the Los Angeles police beating has been arrested as he waited to be interviewed by CNN:

Amateur photographer Mitchell Crooks was arrested outside CNN’s Los Angeles bureau where he was scheduled for an interview. Witnesses said he was screaming as he was driven away by plainclothes officers.

Authorities said Crooks was taken to the grand jury investigating the beating case. He had failed to appear before the jury Thursday morning as scheduled. Authorities said his arrest was unrelated to that case.

Sorry, but I don’t believe there’s anything routine about this. It looks like an attempt to intimidate a witness. Somebody at the L.A. County D.A.’s office should lose his/her job over it.

UPDATE: Hmm. Read this phone transcript. The DA doesn’t look any better.

I’ve been agnostic on this story — but now LA is acting like it’s got something to hide. That makes me believe they’re guilty.

REASON points out that George Bush may be positioning himself to the left of Barbara Boxer on the question of arming airline pilots. And he’s already to the left of Richard Cohen!

JOHN WEIDNER IS CALLING FOR BLOGGERS TO MOUNT AN OFFENSIVE in favor of freedom in Iran. Let’s do it!

GRAY DAVIS UPDATE: Today’s Field poll gives him a lead of only 7 points, and says his “supporters” don’t like him very much, they’re just uncomfortable with Simon. Daniel Wiener, who has been skeptical of Simon’s chances up to now, thinks that Davis is in trouble.

I’m no California political expert, but today’s power problems can’t be helping.

OKAY, THIS ISN’T REALLY NEWS: I remember a scientist telling me at a conference in 1999 that with a protein synthesizer and a computer anyone could make homemade viruses from scratch. But now someone has gone and done it.

Unfortunately, we’re in a technological window of vulnerability at the moment. In a decade or two, you’ll be able to manufacture a cure just as easily. But not now.

MARK, STEYN WRITES THAT IT’S ROPE-A-DOPE AGAIN — only it’s the Euros who are the dopes:

For Bush, it’s a win–win situation. If the Palestinians elect the Hamas crowd, he can say, ‘Fine, I respect your choice. Call me back when you decide to put self-government before self-detonation.’ If they opt for plausible state and municipal legislators, Bush will have re-established an important principle: that when the Americans sign on to nation-building they do so only to bring into being functioning democratic, civilised states — as they did with postwar Germany and Japan. Who’s to say it couldn’t work in Palestine? Not being a colonial power, the Americans don’t have that win-a-few-lose-a-few attitude — here a Canada, there a Zimbabwe — that the British have. So the Bush plan is perfect: heads we win, tails you lose. That’s also how some of these other international questions are being framed: heads, the International Criminal Court will be modified to our satisfaction; tails, we won’t have to do any more lousy UN peacekeeping.

The question Matthew Parris might like to ask as he weeds his borders is why could no European leader make a speech like that? How did it come about that the entire EU reflexively stuck with an aging terrorist who cancelled the last scheduled elections? Which bear is really the one with the little brain?

Personally, I think of the Europeans more as Eeyore: always talking about how nobody likes them and nothing’s going to work out, but being invited along anyway.

ERIC ALTERMAN can’t stop defending Hugo Chavez. But I don’t see where his comments about Hitler’s election differ from what I said below.

Alterman adds an unattributed version of Godwin’s Law:

[W]e have a rule in my house. If you have to go to Hitler, you’ve already lost the argument.

Well, we have a rule in my house, too: If you keep claiming that Gore really won in Florida, you’ve lost the argument, too. And the election!

UPDATE: Porphyrogenitus isn’t having any of it:

If he was a right-winger, then the behavior of the Chavez government and the mass protests against him would be an international cause-celeb and Chavez would be rightly drummed out of the community of “respectable” government leaders. Since he’s a Left-wing Fascist and friend of Castro, they’re ignored (and the Liberals and Leftists who usually claim to speak for “human rights” seem to admire him and say that anything against him is “contrary to democacy”). Typical.

Indeed, the double standard here is quite visible.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Dennis Bumb writes:

RE: Eric Alterman’s “Hitler Rule”

Mr. Alterman says “[We] have a rule in my house. If you have to go to

Hitler, you’ve lost the argument.”

I’m a big fan of Godwin’s Law, but when the topic of conversation is, I

don’t know, DICTATORS, then maybe bringing up Hitler is somewhat apropos.

Does the Alterman Rule also apply to discussions of genocide or the Nazis?

That must make for some weird conversations.

Well, I’ve never visited Eric’s house, so I couldn’t say.

ANDREW HOFER has uncovered an internal Al Qaeda memorandum that, apparently, didn’t make it to all the troops.

LOUIS FARRAKHAN IS DENYING earlier reports that he prayed for an Iraqi victory over the United States:

“I would never ask God to allow the American people, of whom I am one, to be slaughtered in a war or to die in a war for really what I see is a vendetta of our government against Saddam Hussein,” Farrakhan said.

Weirdly, this makes Farrakhan sound more patriotic than Stanley Hauerwas, who prayed for something very much like that:

Sober us with the knowledge that you will judge this nation, you will humble this nation, you will destroy this nation for our pride. Send us a reminder that you are God, that you alone have the right of vengeance, and if it be your will, make those we bomb instruments of your judgment.

IS THE L. A. TIMES GOING TO FOLLOW SALON’S BUSINESS MODEL? Sounds like it, based on this L.A. Examiner report. And is there a teensy bit of antitrust concern in that “priceless” quote?

SPEAKING OF STACKED PANELS: Now that the Kass Council is done, and turned out to be less stacked than it appeared, maybe there’s hope for this NAS panel on gun violence. Though one panel member denied being “rabidly antigun,” critics said otherwise. Let’s see whether they prove the critics wrong, or right.

TAPPED SAYS I’M WRONG about the insignificance of the Kass Council report on cloning. According to Tapped it signals a new political strategy: now that an outright ban on cloning has stalled, go for a “moratorium” instead. This is probably right — but its entirely political nature underscores the insignificance of the Kass Council’s expertise. You don’t need a panel of bigshot experts to be politically expedient.

A BACKDOOR EFFORT TO GET A NATIONAL ID? Read this. I’m against it. If we can’t keep the State Department’s employees from selling visas to terrorists, how are we going to keep lowly DMV clerks from circumventing this for pay?

LOOKING FOR A DIRTY BOMB: Now this is just plain weird.

TODAY IS THE FORTIETH ANNIVERSARY of the first transatlantic TV transmission, via Telstar.

Which, by the way, is also the title of a very cool song by The Shadows, produced by music-tech-geek hero Joe Meek.

UPDATE: Oops. Reader Chuck Freund informs me that it was the Tornadoes, not the Shadows. He’s right, too. Well, I was in diapers at the time. . . .

NPR IS GETTING IT FROM BOTH SIDES — while conservative groups say it’s biased, lefty alternative media say it’s sold out to corporations, and that it played an evil and inappropriate role in squashing low-power radio. Sadly, I think both groups are right.

NPR IS APOLOGIZING to the Traditional Values Coalition for suggesting, apparently with no basis whatsoever, that the group may have been behind anthrax attacks.

I’m sure I disagree with the TVC on at least as many issues as I do with NPR, but the report on NPR here sounds pretty damned bad — and all too typical, I’m afraid.

OBSCENE MORAL EQUIVALENCE, a continuing series: Here’s how Patrick Bateson, Provost of Kings College, Cambridge, justifies Mona Baker’s removal of two Israeli scholars from an academic journal based on their nationality:

Always,” he said, “science is set in social contexts.” As an example he cited Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor who tortured Jewish children in experiments.

“Supposing we had the possibility of collaborating with a Mengele,” Professor Bateson said. “That would be a case where everybody would say politics would definitely come into science, and say we could not let that happen.”

Sometimes I think I’m too hard on the Euro-academic crowd. But maybe I’m not hard enough.

BARBARA BOXER supporting armed pilots? And over the objections of the Violence Policy Center! That’s what Craig Schamp reports. The VPC’s star has really set.

UPDATE: Heck, these guys can’t even keep Massachussetts from liberalizing its gun laws. (Though once you get past the Globe’s hysterical coverage there’s not all that much going on here). Still, it’s Massachussetts. Looks like I was right when I said last fall that the tone was shifting on this issue.

THE KASS BIOETHICS COUNCIL has issued its report. The Post is treating the results as mixed, but anti-cloning people are crowing while researchers say the process was political.

But as I wrote in May, it doesn’t really matter. Bush has already made up his mind to oppose cloning, making the Kass Council a sideshow at best, phony political window-dressing at worst. The big news, if there’s any, is that the Council, despite looking stacked, was so closely divided. This suggests that anticloning legislation is going to continue to have trouble in Congress. That’s as it should be, since it’s none of Congress’s constitutional business anyway.

Here’s a link to the report. I’m going to try to read it later, though I’m very pressed for time, trying to get a project finished today. In the meantime, you can read this FoxNews column of mine from February, and see if you think the report answers the objections set out there.

UPDATE: Virginia Postrel hasn’t weighed in on this yet (in fact, she hasn’t posted in two weeks) but I imagine she will, soon. Meanwhile, Charles Murtaugh has a post.