CHARLES MURTAUGH takes on left-wing homophobia.

UPDATE: Tony Adragna responds, and draws a fine distinction: “But let’s not confuse this with homophobia born of an irrational intolerance of homosexuals. The attacks on Andrew Sullivan are something different — a calculated attempt by a cabal of ideologues who share an intense hatred of Andrew Sullivan.” Arthur Silber, meanwhile, is less charitable. Meanwhile, Atrios calls me a “noted queer theorist!” (thanks!) and says that they’re worse at Free Republic, which seems to me to be a pretty lame defense.

I have to say that I’ve visited a couple of lefty blogs that invited me to link to them, and seen posts calling Sullivan the “blog queen” or whatever, and thought better of it. I don’t generally link to blogs that call people n*ggers either. Well, that’s just me.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Arthur Silber has another post, and he says it is homophobia.

ONE MORE: A reader emails that I linked to “BitchPundit,” who uses the term “butt pirates” to refer to Islamic hackers. Uh, okay. I didn’t really read that as being of the same order (nothing with “pirate” in it seems that bad to me) but okay. It’s not really the same as wishing that someone with HIV would die soon, though, is it?

BLOGFORMS IN EVOLUTION: This is kind of like a “Misting” — except with Roman Emperors instead of robots — and it’s directed at another blog’s commentary section.

Blogosphere sociologists take note. The judges give this one an 8.7, adjusted up to 9.9 for originality and degree of difficulty.

TOREN SMITH says we should be calling him the Maryland Assassin, rather than the “Maryland Sniper.” Good point.

UPDATE: Mr. Mustard, meanwhile, argues that the Assassin is largely irrelevant, and should be treated as such.

MATT WELCH has an interesting column on the apparent necessity — and inevitable vices — of America providing “adult supervision” to the rest of the world. I recommend reading it together with this Jonah Goldberg column and this post by Stephen Green. (Welch has more on his weblog, too.)

To oversimplify, Welch’s worry — supported by the other items — is that by assuming so much global responsibility, the United States is keeping other countries in a state of arrested development. This is a very real issue. Unfortunately, the rise of weapons of mass destruction has made intermediate stages of responsibility dangerous. But U.S. planners, when they look past the next couple of years, need to think about Welch’s point. Long-term, we need to be encouraging responsibility, not dependence.

I hope Matt’s next column contains some suggestions on how to do that.

DOES AN N.R.A. STICKER provide “reasonable suspicion” to search a car for a gun? Eugene Volokh has the answer.

IS IT JUST ME? The New York Times Magazine contents page features an article by Paul Krugman that is described thusly:

How the permissive capitalism of the boom destroyed American equality.

• Forum: Is America becoming a society for the rich, by the rich?

But scroll down and you’ll see:

Clothes Made the Man

By PETER McQUAID

In his Hawaiian hideaway, Geoffrey Beene muses on his first love: fashion.

• Slide Show: Beene’s Hawaiian Hideaway

FOOD

Regime Change

By JONATHAN REYNOLDS

The secret of one spa’s success is not its rules; it’s the owner.

The ads don’t exactly worship Wal-Mart, either. The Times evinces lots of support for the idea of a middle-class — just not its politics, values, or lifestyle.

UPDATE: Hey, I only just now noticed (via Atrios) that Krugman mentions me in the piece — to say I was right about the stats on Sweden, and then to say it doesn’t matter because the stats aren’t important. Only in Krugmanworld am I a “conservative,” though. (Happy now, Atrios?) Or maybe he’s just trying to pigeonhole me because we occupy the same ecological niche? Somehow I doubt it.

I will note that Krugman’s comments about Sweden remind me of the standard cry of economic fall-behinds: “we’re poor, but we’re rich in the things you can’t count.” Such statements may be true, of course, but they’re awfully convenient.

UPDATE: I should do a longer post on this, but I don’t have time right now. Let me just note that it’s okay to say that per-capita GDP has its flaws as a measure of societal wealth — but I seem only to hear this when the comparison is between the United States and Sweden.

BITCHPUNDIT has some advice for Islamic hackers:

One of my other sites is more serious than this one; it’s a science-education outreach portal, and about six months ago there were several hacking attempts that were traced back to middle-eastern countries. This hacking was carried on in sync with a bunch of viruses which were also emailed to me damn near constantly, and when I had them traced down, they were affiliated with a radical Islamic fundamentalist group. But, nothing as exciting as what Rex had, alas.

Buncha script kiddies, that’s all these butt pirates are. They can’t wage real war, so they are sending Hi-Tek Teenage Mutant Ninja Muslims from Bloggerstan, instead.

733t HaXX0r 4 A77AH! A77AH 0wZ J00!

Yeah. Whatever. I’ve got yer blog right here, Osama. I double-dog dare you.

And scroll down for a nice graphic dedicated to North Korea.

UPDATE: Hey, she’s done a graphic just for me, too. Cool!

MICKEY KAUS’S E-MAIL PLEA: “Note: I am also very interested in a pill or herb that will make my penis grow 3-4 inches. Please send information. …”

MARK STEYN has a piece on celebrities in politics that’s too good to excerpt. He doesn’t mention Woody Harrelson or Sean Penn (actually, nobody seems to mention Sean Penn — which seems extraordinarily charitable, but then he is still trying to live down the whole Madonna thing). Maybe they’ll be fodder for next week’s column.

UPDATE: N.Z. Bear has taken up the Sean Penn challenge.

LOTS OF INTERESTING POLITICAL NEWS at Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire. My favorite quote: “When the voters of Hawaii awake the morning after the Nov. 5 election, they are likely to find they have done two extraordinary things: elect a live Republican to the governor’s office and a dead Democrat to Congress. Such is the state of politics in Hawaii this year.”

SOME HAPLESS “NO BLOOD FOR OIL” PROTESTERS AT THE U.N. had the misfortune to encounter Tim Blair. The poor bastards.

But where the Hell is Ken Layne?

WISH ORCHID A happy blogday!

VEGARD VALBERG shows Woody Harrelson the error of his ways.

SLUGGER O’TOOLE has blogged Tony Blair’s speech on Northern Ireland, along with some other interesting developments. Just keep scrolling.

I DON’T LINK TO ANDREW SULLIVAN THAT MUCH, since I figure most people who read me probably read him anyway. But this post on North Korea — and on who got it right — is a must-read.

HERE’S THE FULL TEXT of a post of mine from yesterday:

ED LAZARUS IS DEEPLY CONFUSED according to this post at the Volokh Conspiracy. In fact, it is reported, he has the import of Nobel Economist Vernon Smith’s work exactly backwards.

Now here’s how Brad DeLong abbreviated it on his page:

According to Instapundit,

“ED LAZARUS IS DEEPLY CONFUSED… has the import of Nobel Economist Vernon Smith’s work exactly backwards.”

Now, to be fair, DeLong links to me, so that anyone who followed the link wouldn’t be confused. But anyone who didn’t would be inclined to think that Eugene Volokh’s ideas were mine. That probably works to my benefit, of course, since Eugene Volokh is sufficiently smart that any association with him is likely to add lustre to my reputation, but it’s still a bit odd, especially given how brief the original post was. (In fact, the ideas in question, which DeLong attributes to Eugene, are actually from another poster at The Volokh Conspiracy, but to figure that out you’d have to follow a second link. I presume that this is merely an oversight on DeLong’s part).

Or was DeLong just trying to troll me into linking his page? D’oh!

UPDATE: DeLong’s corrected the post. Thanks!

GOOD GRIEF. I’ve got a new Blogchild, but she’s a bit, er, naughty.

JONAH GOLDBERG on foreign policy and food stamps:

If you have a fairly limitless supply of food stamps but a very small amount of cash on hand, over time you will not only grow to believe, but will actually become quite self-righteous about, your conviction that food stamps should be as good as cash everywhere — including car dealerships, movie theaters, and casinos. In fact, it won’t be too long before you see food stamps as the only legitimate form of currency. . . .

The point here is that the Europeans, the Japanese, and — to a somewhat lesser extent — the South Koreans argue for talking through their problems because, like a thick wad of food stamps burning a hole in their pockets, talk is pretty much the only currency they have to spend. For nearly five decades, Europe and Japan have been, in effect, living off the military credit card we gave them. We subsidized their defense and, money being fungible, they took their savings and poured it into bloated welfare states. This policy was certainly in America’s interests during the Cold War, and I’m not suggesting our system of alliances is totally obsolete. But there are huge negative consequences to it.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: And read this by Stephen Green, too.

ANOTHER DENIED ENTRY: This time the maid who was beaten by a Saudi Princess. Result:

Suryono left the United States to attend her mother’s funeral in Indonesia. However, she was denied a visa to return to Florida because immigration authorities feared she might try to stay in the country illegally. The Violence Against Women Act, passed in 1994, allows non-citizens to be granted visas to attend criminal trials.

Without Suryono as a witness, Assistant State Attorney Mike Saunders went ahead with negotiating a no contest plea for misdemeanor battery charges. The Florida Circuit Court judge accepted the plea–which allows the defendant to accept punishment without admitting or denying guilt–and placed al-Saud, currently in Saudi Arabia, on unsupervised probation. The princess was also fined $1,000 and court fees. The probation will most likely not affect al-Saud’s ability to get a visa to re-enter the United States. . . .

Suryono’s attorney, Russell Troutman, expressed concern about the fairness of the immigration department’s action. “Why in the world wouldn’t they give her a visa?” Troutman asked. “I’m speculating that it was an attempt on the part of the administration to do a favor for the royal family.”

Outrageous.

HOWARD JACOBSON renounces Western self-hatred — in the Independent!

If we are the responsibility of those who beget us, then they must be our responsibility in turn. The past flows through us as certainly as the future. A genetic no less than a theological truth. But that’s not the same as taking blame when there is no blame to be taken. An obscene act of arrogation, I now realise, making one’s culpability the heart of everything. Unjust to one’s immortal soul, which wants no part of it. And unjust even to the Nazis and their like, who must be allowed to sin egregiously on their own behalf and go to hell unmolested.

Ditto those who blew apart the however many hundreds of kids dancing the last of their lives away in Bali. It behoves us to stay out of their motives. Utterly obscene, the narrative of guilty causation which now waits on every fresh atrocity – “What else are the dissatisfied to do but kill?” etc – as though dissatisfaction were an automatic detonator, as though Cain were the creation of Abel’s will. Obscene in its haste. Obscene in its self-righteousness, mentally permitting others to pay the price of our self-loathing. Obscene in its ignorance – for we should know now how Selbsthass operates, encouraging those who hate us only to hate us more, since we concur in their conviction of our detestableness.

Here is our decadence: not the nightclubs, not the beaches and the sex and the drugs, but our incapacity to believe we have been wronged. Our lack of self-worth.

Why do they hate us? In part because so many Western intellectuals tell them they should.

UPDATE: Reid Reynolds (who’s no relation) emails:

“Western intellectuals tell them they should.” Truer words were ne’er spoken. Every time I check into these foreign websites it’s Noam Chomsky said this and Robert Fisk said that, and all these lesser demons like Mark Crispin Miller et al. are regularly cited, too.

These guys are literally killing us. I wish someone would publicize these guys and their evil scribblings. Most Americans, I think, don’t even know who they are.

Well, we of the Blogosphere are doing our best!

ADVANTAGE: INSTAPUNDIT! This Nick Kristof column is unexceptional, except for the following revelation near the end: “As Kuwait sees it, the possibilities range from a Tommy Franks viceroyalty to the installation of a Sunni Hashemite king, some relative of Jordan’s King Abdullah II. Jordan already seems to be quietly lobbying for this outcome.” Of course, when I raised the idea of a Hashemite Restoration a year ago, I was talking about a post-Saudi Arabia, not a post-Saddam Iraq. I imagine, though, that a Hashemite transitional regime, along the lines of Juan Carlos’ post-Franco role, could work out.

BELLESILES UPDATE UPDATE: If you haven’t checked, my original post about Jon Weiner’s attempted defense of Bellesiles in The Nation has been updated a lot and you should check the new material out.

In general, since I often update posts, it’s a good idea to scroll back down the page from time to time, and not assume that the only new stuff is at the top. But you probably knew that.

Given that Emory is surely going to have to come out with a decision in the Bellesiles case soon, several readers have wondered if the Wiener piece represents a last-ditch effort to generate some favorable publicity so as to justify a slap-on-the-wrist penalty like demotion or suspension. I don’t know. I’m inclined to think it’s probably a waste of time if so, given that (since we know Bellesiles is appealing an adverse decision) there seems to be pretty solid evidence against him. I certainly agree with Jerome Sternstein that a whitewash would be a major mistake for Emory:

So far, the investigation into allegations of research misconduct by Bellesiles appears to cover only the evidentiary problems publicly revealed before last February. But researchers are continuing to unearth errors which are just as serious and resonant of academic fraud as those that have already been brought to light, including new evidence tending to show that Bellesiles never, ever used some of the records he claimed to have employed; never, ever spent a moment in some of the archives holding records that he claimed to have read; and never, ever read hundreds of records that existed only in his own imagination (far more non-existent records than have been revealed publicly so far). When this new scholarship is published, which it most surely will be, Emory would again find itself entwined in a scandal, this time of its own making and with a “smell” emanating from the inner sanctum of the administration. If Bellesiles continues to teach at Emory, it is almost certain that Emory will again be consumed by another investigation of Bellesiles — an investigation demanded simply by its own guidelines and the pervasiveness of the alleged fabrications in Arming America.

Given that University administrators dislike scandal, and given that Bellesiles has been a one-man bad-publicity squad for Emory for over a year, it’s hard for me to believe that they’d want to keep this alive, especially when the evidence seems so strong. But I could be wrong.

UPDATE: Wiener’s article doesn’t seem to be getting much of a reception over at the History News Network site. And this HNN post by Don Williams suggests that the decision is due next week.

ANOTHER UPDATE TO THE UPDATE UPDATE: Or something like that. Here’s another post by Don Williams with some interesting links and commentary relating to the Nation piece.

FLOYD MCWILLIAMS is unimpressed with the UNCLE oSAMa cartoon from TomPaine.Com.

STEVEN MILLOY OF JUNKSCIENCE.COM WRITES THAT Ballistic Fingerprinting is junk science. Excerpt:

Maryland and New York already require ballistic fingerprinting. So far it hasn’t helped convict a single criminal in Maryland despite “fingerprinting” 17,000 guns sold since January 2000. New York hasn’t had success either.

And there isn’t likely to be success any time soon, according to the study.

The report included the test firing of more than 2,000 rounds from 790 pistols.

When cartridges from the same manufacturer were test-fired and compared, computer matching failed 38 percent of the time. With cartridges from different manufacturers, computer matching failed 62 percent of the time.

“Automated computer matching systems do not provide conclusive results” requiring that “potential candidates be manually reviewed,” said the experts.

There’s more. Read it all.

UPDATE: Similar considerations have led Doug Turnbull, who I mentioned below, to change his mind on this subject.

HOW LONG UNTIL THIS is blamed on America?

UPDATE: Not long, as several readers emailed to note that the story was updated with an entirely un-germane reference to the D.C. sniper. I don’t know if that’s exactly what I meant, but. . . .