DISCRIMINATIONS has moved, and has a fancy new site designed by you-know-who.

I guess there’s somebody else out there doing classy site design for weblogs, but. . . .

UPDATE: Rand Simberg emails that he likes this guy.

JOHN TABIN SAYS THAT MARK SHIELDS shamelessly misrepresented an item from Best of the Web on Capital Gang tonight.

Knowing Shields’ tendency to repeat himself, he’ll probably do it again on another show.

UPDATE: Just caught the Capital Gang rerun and it’s as Tabin describes. Shields gets steadily more embarrassing. But the big news on Capital Gang was what lousy reviews Al Gore’s speech on the economy got from pretty much everyone but Shields. Even Margaret Carlson and Al Hunt were brutal.

ON THE OTHER HAND, THE BRITISH PRESS REMAINS LAME, especially on American reporting: Jim Henley is correcting an item suggesting that people were cowering in their homes, noting that:

This is all so last Thursday. Schools locked down, meaning cancelled recess and field trips, locked doors and, I think, drew blinds, Thursday only. “Shut down” makes it sound like schools closed. Nearly as I could tell, the killers were the only people who didn’t get out today – every place we went was mobbed. I don’t doubt you could find some people willing to tell a reporter they were scared, but watch what we do here in MoCo, not what we say. And “the last victim” at the time this story must have been filed was either the Petworth man or the Kensington Shell killing. Any place in Rockville is “close” to either place only on the transatlantic scale.

You tell ’em, Jim. He’s got more updates, too, if you scroll down.

RULE BRITANNIA! Seems like there’s some support for the war there. . . .

The prospect of war with Iraq is encouraging a record number of young Britons to join up.

Over the past six months 7,350 recruits have joined the Army, compared with 6,592 for the same period last year. Two years ago the comparative figure was 5,935.

The figures represent a rise of 11.5 per cent on last year and 23 per cent on 2000 and suggest that the Army is likely to recruit a record 15,000 new soldiers. The bulk of the increase is in the infantry, which has suffered most from recruiting problems.

The recruitment boost follows years of failing to attract enough new soldiers to keep the Army at full strength. Despite repeated advertising campaigns all three armed services – particularly the Army – had been unable to meet their targets until recently. The Army has also not been helped by potentially damaging setbacks such as the failure of the Army’s new rifle – the SA80-A2 – in Afghanistan.

One senior military officer told The Telegraph: “There is a direct correlation between the increased recruiting figures and the prospect of a war with Iraq. History has shown time after time that as far as the British public is concerned, recruiting is never a problem when there is a war in the offing.”

Why, that’s an almost Tennessee-like spirit.

WELL, I CERTAINLY HAVEN’T PRAISED OLIVER NORTH, and I can’t think of any leading “warblogger” who has. This hardly counts as praise.

UPDATE: Sawicky has responded to Dr. Weevil, and Dr. Weevil appears to have fact-checked Sawicky rather thoroughly.

THE GUARDIAN on the Maryland shootings;

The fear of sudden death hangs like a shroud over the entire State under which its hapless and anxious citizens scurry from cover to cover lest they be the sniper’s next victim. This is the real America; rheumy-eyed, mistrustful and dangerous. A place where any passing stranger could be a stone-cold killer and where a violent and bloody death waits just around the next turning for its vulnerable and haunted citizens.

While the police search frantically to find the elusive marksman before he claims his next victim, maybe they should pause to consider whether they will ever really bring the guilty party to justice. For, regardless of who’s finger is actually pulling the trigger, the real culprit here is America itself.

This hasn’t been published in the Guardian yet, but it’s only a matter of time, reports David Carr.

DAWSON RESPONDS IN KIND to the Social Security wheelchair ad.

I’M KINDA BUSY, but go read Fred Pruitt for all kinds of interesting news. I’ll be back. Mickey Kaus has some cool new stuff, too.

HORSEFEATHERS has a new, Sekimori-designed site and a new URL. Adjust your bookmarks accordingly.

CENTRAL PARK JOGGER UPDATE: TalkLeft has the scoop.

AZIZ POONAWALLA distinguishes neoconservatives and neoWilsonians and others who support war.

MILITARY EXPERT UNDERMINES CASE FOR WAR! Here’s the inside story.

“BROKER — GET ME A THOUSAND SHARES OF SALON!”

“Okay — got something smaller than a twenty?”

BAGHDAD DEMOCRATS: More on Bonior and McDermott:

IT’S A RARE POLITICAL MOMENT when Terry McAuliffe says no comment. Yet McAuliffe, the garrulous chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said just that last Wednesday at the Brookings Institution after a speech by Al Gore. Asked about the trip to Baghdad taken by three of his fellow partisans–Representatives David Bonior, Jim McDermott, and Mike Thompson–McAuliffe was nonplussed.

“Have we issued anything on that?” he asked DNC spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri, who shook her head.

“I don’t think we have,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders.

“We handle the politics, and leave those comments to elected officials,” Palmieri explained. “But nice try.”

Problem is, the elected officials aren’t saying much either. Bonior was until recently the second-ranking Democrat in the House, and yet it’s nearly impossible to get Democrats to say anything about his and the others’ trip to Baghdad.

Yeah, and as I’ve said that silence will make it easy — and not entirely unfair — for Republicans to tar the entire Democratic Party apparatus as disloyal. Especially when you read the accounts of how their trip has been used in Iraqi propaganda.

DEAN has lots of information on the DC/Maryland shootings. He thinks it’s domestic terrorism, or simple fruitcakeness, and has a police radio intercept looking for a white male named Robert Baker, said to be a cocaine user armed with a scoped hunting rifle, as evidence.

UPDATE: Jim Henley has more too.

ANOTHER UPDATE: William Burton agrees with Armed Liberal’s take on what a proliferation of incidents like this might mean:

We have two ‘success’ stories in dealing with terrorism this go-round. Flight 93 and LAX. I’m not suggesting that we arm passengers with handguns (although I do think we’re crazy not to have immediately allowed pilots to have them). I am suggesting that the only form of defense that is likely to work while there the bodies are still breathing is to involve every one of us as an thoughtful, active observer of our environment, and someone who is willing to act appropriately when it is called for.

In some cases, that will involve larger numbers of people with guns.

They can be officers, standing on streetcorners, costing us tax dollars, and nosing deeper and deeper into our lives, or they can be citizens. Our pilot. The ticket agent. Our neighbors.

Some of then will screw up. Some of them will do bad things.

But the reality is that they screw up and do bad things right now. And as far as I can tell from other folks’ experience, it doesn’t get better as you try and take the guns away.

And it doesn’t get worse as you let people have them, either.

I think he’s right, though fortunately we’re not yet at the point of having to defend against that many dispersed attacks. Are we?

UPDATE: Gary Hudson replies to my comments just above:

“I think he’s right, though fortunately we’re not yet at the point of having to defend against that many dispersed attacks. Are we?”

Sure we are Glenn, it’s called crime. Happens everyday.

Terrorism doesn’t leave ordinary folk any less dead than a street mugging or a “stop and rob” store holdup. Everyone has the right to self defense, with or without the State validating that right. Encouraging and promoting the widespread use of arms will have benefits beyond any minor impact on the War of Terrorism. It would mean a safer and freer society.

Fair enough.

UPDATE: Justin Katz isn’t persuaded by the “homegrown terrorist” arguments. And reader David Darlington writes:

Anyway, something I’ve been wondering: did the DC police ever catch the blowdart sniper from earlier this year? It seems this guy or guys have the same M.O. as the blowdart sniper, but a much more powerful weapon. He’s shooting at random people from consealed locations. Maybe the blowdart sniper and Maryland rifle shooter are related.

Beats me. Anyone else know?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Vegard Valberg says this looks like a scenario he pointed out last summer.

STILL MORE: Now they’re reportedly on the lookout for two “hispanic” looking men” — is it just me, or are they trying awfully hard to avoid any reference to anyone looking middle-eastern here?

JAY FITZGERALD reports many interesting Harvard-related developments, including resistance to Larry Summers’ initiative against anti-Semitism and a report on a speech by Cornel West continuing to whine about Summers’ insistence that he do actual work.

He also links to this oped by Charles Jacobs of the American Anti-Slavery Group on why Israel gets criticized in ways other countries do not:

It is hard to explain why victims of slavery and slaughter are virtually ignored by American progressives. How can it be that there is no storm of indignation at Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, which, though they rushed to Jenin to investigate false reports of Jews massacring Arabs, care so much less about Arab-occupied Juba, South Sudan’s black capital? How can it be that they have not raised the roof about Khartoum’s black slaves? Neither has there been a concerted effort by the press to pressure American administrations to intervene. Nor has the socialist left spoken of liberating the slaves or protecting black villages from pogroms, even though Wall Street helps bankroll Khartoum’s oil business, which finances the slaughter.

What is this silence about? Surely it is not because we don’t care about blacks. Progressives champion oppressed black peoples daily. My hypothesis is this: to predict what the human rights community (and the media) focus on, look not at the oppressed; look instead at the party seen as the oppressor. Imagine the media coverage and the rights groups’ reaction if it were ”whites” enslaving blacks in Sudan. Having the ”right” oppressor would change everything.

Alternatively, imagine the ”wrong” oppressor: Suppose that Arabs, not Jews, shot Palestinians in revolt. In 1970 (”Black September”), Jordan murdered tens of thousands of Palestinians in two days, yet we saw no divestment campaigns, and we wouldn’t today. This selectivity (at least in the United States, does not come from the hatred of Jews. It is ” a human rights complex ” – and is not hard to understand. The human rights community, composed mostly of compassionate white people, feels a special duty to protest evil done by those who are like ”us.”

I don’t know. Still sounds racist to me, both in its definition of who qualifies as a moral actor, and its disproportionate effect on non-whites. He’s right about this part, though:

The biggest victims of this complex are not the Jews who are obsessively criticized but the victims of genocide, enslavement, religious persecution, and ethnic cleansing who are murderously ignored: the Christian slaves of Sudan, the Muslim slaves of Mauritania, the Tibetans, the Kurds, the Christians in Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt.

Seeking expiation instead of universal justice means ignoring the sufferings of these victims of non-Western aggression and making relatively more of the suffering of those caught in confrontation with people like ”us.” If the Israelis are being ”profiled” because they are like ”us,” the slaves of Sudan are ignored because their masters’ behavior has nothing to do with us.

Yes.

UPDATE: Rand Simberg offers another reason why the left’s divestment efforts are so one-sided.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The Jacobs piece has led Telford Work to post some thoughts on the Marxist roots of “progressive” thought about oppression, and the inadequacies thereof.

“IN IRAN, SOMETHING HAS TO GIVE.” Interesting story on what’s going on there. Excerpt:

Down in the basement, a man with an uncanny resemblance to the Sgt Pepper period John Lennon is recording a CD. With him, in the hot, stuffy studio, is a bassist dressed in black, a drummer and a 10-year-old Afghan boy playing small tambour drums. Behind the glass, a sound engineer is flicking switches and twiddling knobs. A girl in jeans, T-shirt and trainers is slouched on a sofa with a young man. Two other girls are watching the session. Not having visited the underground before, I am taken aback. The girls are not wearing the full, officially decreed women’s dress code. This includes covering one’s hair for fear of “stimulating” any man who might see it.

This discreet studio is one where Tehran’s underground bands come to record. It is as if I have stepped through the looking glass into another country. Above us, in the streets, is the Iran of women in all-enveloping black chadors, vast murals of revolutionary martyrs and officially sanctioned demonstrations where thousands chant the old slogans of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”. Here, I am in another, freer Iran that exists in parallel with the Islamic republic. In Iran, there is the public face of conformity with Islamic rules and regulations and the private face, which, as often as not, shuns, ignores or even despises its strictures. . . .

Once a forgotten figure, the US-based pretender to the Peacock throne is now frequently seen repeating a mantra of democracy and secularism. This is not to say that the monarchy has a real chance of restoration, but Pahlavi on TV has had an effect – many young people, who have no memory of his father’s repressive regime, have been favourably impressed. Muhammed, 19, who works in his father’s restaurant, says, “Me and my friends like [Pahlavi] because we heard from our fathers that the time of the Shah was a time of comfort, not like now, so, if he came back, that would come back, too.”

Two years ago, 500,000 Iranians had access to the internet. Today, that number is believed to be 1.75 million, and is expected to grow to five million in the next five years.

As the article reports, a lot of them are blogging, too.

JOSH CHAFETZ’S “IMMUTABLE LAWS OF DOWD” have made the jump from OxBlog to The Weekly Standard.

READER ABHIJIT JAIN notes Saudi Arabia’s alcohol problem. I guess some people there have developed an Obsession.

LYNN SISLO REINVENTS ANTI-IDIOTARIANISM:

I don’t think I’ve actually shifted to the Right. It’s just that since September 11 the Right has done a much better job of shutting up their lunatic fringe, while the common sense Left has gone into hiding and let their lunatics take over. So the Left is worried about the Right dominating the blogosphere. . . .

I come across lefty blogs all the time. I’ve even linked a few of them. The “problem” is not that the blogoshpere is dominated by the “Right”, it’s that the blogosphere is dominated by common sense. Let a blogger from the far right start preaching their own brand of lunacy – (Sept. 11 happened because God is angry…Creationism is just as valid as evolution etc.) – and that person is just as likely to get a severe fisking as any of the loonies on the far left.

She then offers some advice for lefties who fear that the blogosphere is hostile to them and their views.

UPDATE: Lynn wonders what I mean by reinventing anti-idiotarianism. I just thought her post resembled this one, from which the term originated:

What bloggers are more than anything, I think, is anti-idiot. That makes life tough for Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, and the Revs. Falwell, Robertson, Jackson, & Sharpton, for reasons that transcend traditional partisanship and ideology.

That’s all.

JIM HENLEY REPORTS that another shooting is now said to be connected to the earlier shootings. Sorry — this looks like terrorism to me. And Jim’s last observation is troubling.

This would seem to add a bit more support to reader Ken Price’s theory.

UPDATE: Justin Katz suggests an Oregon connection, though the evidence isn’t especially strong in my opinion.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Tucker Goodrich invokes Pipebomb Boy from last spring and notes:

Just ’cause it looks like terrorism doesn’t mean it can’t be one of our many home-grown, garden-variety nut jobs.

Besides, the guy’s a good shot: to my mind, that argues for home-grown. The al-Qaeda don’t seem to be very competent, with a few exceptions.

Yes, though many excellent shots are found among the Afghans. And, of course, home-grown terrorists might well be working hand-in-glove with Saddam Hussein and/or Al Qaeda; they tend to agree on a lot of things, like hating the Jews. Heck, you might even be able to find some Lefty terror types who hate the Jews nowadays — and the Black Panthers, with whom just-arrested Al Qaeda suspect Patrice Lumumba Ford has a connection, have a tradition of excellence where firearms are concerned.

JUST NOTICED THIS POST by Daniel Drezner on why Communism gets better press than Nazism. It’s worth a read.

MARK STEYN ON EUROPE:

Just as a matter of interest, how many countries does George W. Bush have to have on board before America ceases to be acting ‘unilaterally’? So far, there’s Australia, Spain, Italy, the Czech Republic, Qatar, Turkey…. Romania has offered the use of its airspace to attack Iraq. The Americo-Romanian Coalition Against Iraq has more members than most multilateral organisations. But no matter how multilateral it gets, it doesn’t count unless it’s sanctioned by the UN. If France feels the need to invade the Ivory Coast, that can be done unilaterally. But, when it’s America, you gotta get a warrant from the global magistrate. . . .

Imagine any previous power of the last thousand years with America’s unrivalled hegemony and unparalleled military superiority in a unipolar world with nothing to stand in its way but UN resolutions. Pick whoever you like: the Soviet Union, Imperial Japan, the Third Reich, the Habsburgs, Tsarist Russia, Napoleon, Spain, the Vikings. That’s really ‘frightening’. I’ve now read a gazillion columns beginning, ‘He’s a dangerous madman with weapons of mass destruction. No, not Saddam. George W. Bush.’ It barely works as a joke never mind a real threat. The fact that, in all the torrent of anti-Americanism, there’s no serious thought given to how to reverse it nor any urgency about doing so tells you precisely how frightening and dangerous these folks really think the Great Satan is.

But the problem is this. Before 11 September, most Americans tolerated the anti-Yank diatribes from Europe as a quaint example of the local culture. Filtered through the smoke of the World Trade Center, it’s no longer quite so cute. The real phenomenon of the last year is not Europe’s anti-Americanism, which has always existed, but a deep, pervasive and wholly new American weariness with Europe.

Indeed.

BILL QUICK on the DC/Maryland shootings:

I think this is a terror attack. And I think it is being downplayed to the point of coverup.

I could be wrong, but that’s how it looks to me, too.

UPDATE: Reader Ken Price writes:

I’ve had the disturbing thought that the single-shot assassinations in Mongomery County are, in effect, a response to Ari Fleisher’s observation that a single shot could resolve the situation in Iraq. Could this be intended as a warning that capable agents are already in place and ready to cause chaos if war breaks out?

Hmm. This seems (1) too fast; and (2) too “poetic” (well, at least in an Amiri Baraka sense) to be a response to that statement. But it’s an interesting suggestion.

SOME INTERESTING BACKGROUND on one of the acccused American terrorists arrested today.