I’VE SUSPECTED THIS CONNECTION FOR SOME TIME, and StrategyPage offers support:

Thousands of Islamic terrorists have fled Algeria in the last five years, as the army and police gained the upper hand in its war against terrorism. Many of these men fled to Canada and Europe, where they have established al Qaeda cells.

Keep your eye on the Algerian connection. And on who’s connected to the Algerians.

CATS AND DOGS, LIVING TOGETHER: Mickey Kaus is praising Paul Krugman — for his humility!

IT DOESN’T GET MUCH MORE RED-AMERICA THAN THIS: Yesterday, my grandmother and I stopped for barbecue on the way (yes, it was a two-barbecue-stand week! Woohoo!). Here’s a view of the lobby at what is, in my opinion, the best barbecue place in the greater Birmingham area — though that is, naturally enough, a controversial opinion.

Interestingly, though, I’ve never heard anyone claim that Ollie’s Barbecue — integrated by order of the Supreme Court in the case of Katzenbach v. McClung — is the best in town, though. In fact, it wouldn’t make most people’s top ten. I’ve eaten there, and while it doesn’t suck (it’s hard to get bad barbecue in Alabama) it’s no great shakes. Obviously, whatever criteria were involved in choosing Ollie’s for that case had nothing to do with barbecue excellence.

UPDATE: Law-professor (and commerce clause expert) Brannon Denning emails:

FYI, Ollie’s closed down in 2000 or 2001. It had moved out to the ‘burbs from its downtown location, and couldn’t make a go of it. Ollie Sr. died some time ago, and Ollie Jr. had been running it since then. Folks from B’ham told me that while Ollie’s never was as good as when Sr. was running it, it was still the place to get one’s pies for Alabama tailgate parties. You just got the BBQ from elsewhere.

I don’t know if you saw this, but here is a review of a book on the Katzenbach v. McClung and Heart of Atlanta Motel cases that I did for the Law Library Journal.

The book, by Richard Cortner, a political scientist, is quite good, particularly in its description of the personalities involved. I came away with a different picture of Ollie McClung than when I’d started. He was not, as I think many assumed, a sort of Alabama version of Lester Maddox. Though he’d have preferred not to serve blacks in his dining room, he didn’t chase them out with a revolver as Maddox did at the Pickrick.

Maddox, happily, was not typical. The review provides some interesting background on how Ollie’s wound up in the Supreme Court, and why things went as they did. I have always felt, though, that Gerry Gunther (and, with him, Justice Harlan) was right about the preferability of grounding the Civil Rights Act in the 14th Amendment rather than the commerce clause.

JAY MANIFOLD is comparing the Raelian cloning story to Cold Fusion.

SMALLPORX: Chuck Simmins is wondering where the money is really going in the smallpox-preparedness campaign. Investigative journalists: here’s your tip!

UPDATE: Ross at The Bloviator doubts that Chuck’s theory about pork is right, and has some observations about Israel’s decision not to engage in mass smallpox vaccinations.

SKIPPY HAS FOUND THE MYSTERY POLL that TAPPED couldn’t. (Apparently, no one actually reads Time anymore, something I’ve long suspected.) The poll shows Bush’s approval rating at 55%, which Skippy calls “dismal.”

I would call that an exaggeration. But if Bush’s poll numbers are dropping, I think it’s because the sitzkrieg has lasted too long. People have been pretty patient, but if you’re going to be a War President, sooner or later people are going to ask where the war is. I think it’s coming soon, and I think that if it goes well, Bush will go back up. If he blows it — as his father did — his numbers are likely to be truly dismal.

Lefty bloggers want to know why the Time poll is getting so little attention. I’d guess that it’s because it seems out of line with other polls that show Bush much higher. Or it could just be a vast right-wing conspiracy. I report, you decide. . . .

BILL WHITTLE WRITES on the impossibility of American empire.

I WANT MY LILEKS TV, TOO!

BILL QUICK IS FACT-CHECKING SOME PREDICTIONS FOR 2002. Hey, having people see if your predictions come to pass takes all the fun out of punditry!

ERIC ALTERMAN IS RIGHT about Creedence Clearwater Revival, but wrong about John Fogerty. But we’ll get to that later.

Had a nice drive down with my grandmother. Thanks to a bad knee and a sprained ankle, she’s not very mobile at the moment (“I got old all of a sudden at 85,” she says. “Before that I could do anything.”) But the drive down was very pleasant, and we had a lot of nice conversation. Because my parents were living the intinerant-graduate-student lifestyle when I was little, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents in the summer, and it’s almost like a second home. I wish I could have stayed, but I had to come back today. My speed was aided by the relatively light traffic, and by the enormously high velocity of the traffic that was present. I used to think that 80 was fast. Now if you go 80, you’d better be in the right lane.

On the way back, I listened to some CDs, most notably the remastered Creedence Clearwater Revival box set, which is terrific. The remastering is good, though I have some quibbles with it — but if you’re not a sound engineer you probably won’t have any complaints.

Still, listening to both the great original songs and the terrific covers (“Heard it Through the Grapevine” is great, “Good Golly Miss Molly” is the definitive version, and of course there’s “Ooby Dooby,” written by my University of Tennessee colleague Dick Penner) reminds me of why Alterman is right about Creedence but wrong about Fogerty. Alterman said a while back that Creedence’s music was magic but that only Fogerty really counted. But if you listen to the albums you’ll realize that Alterman’s wrong about Fogerty.

True, John Fogerty was the genius of the band. The other members — Doug “Cosmo” Clifford, Stu Cook, and Fogerty’s brother Tom — were just superbly talented musicians. But the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Listen to the way the rhythm guitar (Tom Fogerty), bass (Stu Cook) and drums (Doug Clifford) work together on “Walk on the Water,” for example, and you’ll realize why Creedence Clearwater was better than any of the bands Fogerty has put together since (even his occasional appearances backed by the Grateful Dead). These guys had played together for years, and they were all great — not just individually, but even moreso as a group. You don’t get that from session musicians, however talented.

That’s the difference between the all-star team and a real team, too. Let those artists who are thinking of splitting up their bands and going solo beware.

I’M NOT GOING SKIING like Jeff from Alphecca, but I will be offline for most of the day. I’m driving my grandmother (who at 88 is too old to drive herself such distances, she says) home to Birmingham and then returning. The bad news: 10 hours in the car, minimum. The good news: I get to catch up with her on the way down, and catch up with some CDs I’ve been wanting to listen to on the way back.

THERE’S AN INTERESTING INTRA-LEFT BLOG DEBATE on civil rights going on. Here’s the latest installment in TAPPED.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, Geitner Simmons is refereeing another blog debate on affirmative action.

THE HART JUGGERNAUT ROLLS ON, with Democrat Bill Peschel saying that he’d (reluctantly) vote for Bush over many Democratic candidates because of the war on terror, but that he would support Hart, whose national security credentials are stronger than those of most Democratic candidates. And, as I have said before, after Clinton, the Donna Rice thing seems almost quaint by comparison.

I think that it’s easy to underestimate how much of Bush’s support comes from people like Bill. If Bush wimps out like his father (not likely, pace the repeated worries of Bill Quick) he’s doomed. One reason why I don’t hold with Quick’s theory is that I think Bush knows this very well. Americans either want to wage war with an eye toward winning, or they want to cut their losses and get out of the game. As long as Bush looks serious about winning, he’s in a very strong position. If he stops looking serious, he’s toast.

JULIUS CAESAR ONCE SAID: “Beware the politicians and talking heads who bang the drums of Caesarism. I’m Caesar, and believe me, George W. Bush is no Caesar.”

Well, okay, he never actually said that — though he gets quoted for a lot of things he never said. . . . Sam Tanenhaus does say it, though.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION is already lining up its candidates for an expected Supreme Court vacancy. Let’s hope they’re vetting candidates a bit more closely than they vetted Henry Kissinger before naming him to head the 9/11 investigative committee.

Sadly, there’s no mention in this article of Eugene Volokh’s obvious fitness for the Court. An oversight, no doubt.

THE NEW SMARTERHARPER’SINDEX IS UP!

IS THERE A PATTY MURRAY WHITEWASH? Best of the Web says so. A reader suggests that’s not really the case:

1. She starts out as something of a media darling (remember the “Mom in Tennis Shoes”/”Year of the Woman” stuff from the 1992 campaign). I think the mainstream media will be very reluctant to go after her with as much intensity as they went after Lott. (Even recognizing they were late to that party.)

2. I really don’t see her as an idiotarian in the mold of Fisk, Chomsky, McDermott, Bonior, etc., She’s just a regular, garden-variety idiot. In other words, she says things like “Bin Laden is popular because he builds daycares” because she’s dumb, not because she has a political philosophy that sees the US as the prime source of evil in the world.

As result of #2, I think negative coverage of these remarks and others like them have a good chance of seeming ungentlemanly and/or downright cruel. Again, I believe the mainstream media will be inclined to back off in those circumstances.

I sincerely hope I’m wrong about this. Murray certainly has no business being a US Senator. I just don’t see her getting the full media treatment as Lott eventually did. I also agree that since McDermott and Bonior got a pass, there’s not the slightest chance she’ll ever get pushed out by her own party.

Yeah. In a way, there’s actually something to what Murray said — though given her line about Osama building day-care centers this probably falls into the broken-clock-is-right-twice-a-day category. But one thing I hear from people who’ve spent a lot of time in countries where there’s a substantial Islamic population is that the Saudi money is there year in and year out. The U.S. may come in and do things for a few years, but we get distracted and our interest dries up. The Saudis’ interest doesn’t. They build mosques, they build schools, they provide a lot of medium-influential folks with a secure livelihood and some money to spread around that lets them build up local patronage webs of their own.

We could learn from that. Not only should we work to formulate a reputation for steadfastness instead of flightiness (which we’ll have to do, over time, by actually being steadfast instead of flighty) but we should also seek to make the Saudi money less reliable by interdicting it — either at the source, or somewhere along the line.

I don’t really think that this was what Patty Murray had in mind, though.

NOTE: If you want me to blog about something, an email is sufficient. A link with the email is nice. Sending me an email that’s copied to lots of other people, and claiming that if I don’t immediately jump on your story it’s proof of my intellectual dishonesty, is a poor approach. Especially when you don’t have a link to the original story, and when I can’t find the story when I go to the websites that ought to have it, and can’t confirm it anywhere else.

Just a bit of advice.

JUSTIN KATZ has a VIDEO BLOG ENTRY saying that I’m too optimistic about the future of video blogging. Heh. Maybe — but the number of video bloggers has doubled in a week. Project that one forward a couple of years and, well, my IPO is next week, and — oops, wrong psychology! It’s not 1997 anymore.

HERE’S A CLAIM that a human clone has been born. True? Who knows?

YOU HEAR A LOT ABOUT “CAT BLOGS,” but I’m not sure I’ve ever actually linked to one before. So here. Great domain.

CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES is at Ravenwood this week. Check it out.

GAME THEORY AND SADDAM HUSSEIN: An analysis that doesn’t suggest he’ll be nice, even if he’s rational.

MORE:

Four more alleged Islamic militants have been arrested near Paris, on suspicion of planning a series of terror attacks. The arrests were made on Tuesday in the northern suburb of Romainville, the authorities say.

Last week, four other people of North African origin were detained the nearby suburb of La Courneuve.

During last week’s raids, police say they found bomb-making equipment.

Police say the four men arrested in Romainville are of Algerian origin, and that one is the brother of Mourad Ben Chelali, a French national being held at the US base in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

The French news agency AFP quotes unnamed officials as saying the same explosive substance was found during both raids.

“Alleged militants?” Aren’t they alleged terrorists?

UPDATE: A reader writes:

The various news articles in English were virtually identical so I went digging and found the original AFP release in French. This makes it clear why the difficulties. The articles are all nearly verbatim translations of the French news release.

The French statement identified the four men arrested as “islamists”. They did not say militants, terrorists, etc. They used a word that has more meaning in current French usage than it does in English. But it spans more than terrorist in French usage. It includes advocates, sympathizers and supporters as well as active terrorists.

This leads to the newspaper translators facing the issue of how best to translate this. Militant is a reasonable English translation of what the French sources said.

The French sources may simply be being cautious about criminal accusations. It is fairly trivial to prove that these people are militants. They may have some evidenciary problems proving that they are terrorists. This is like being careful to distinguish between a murderer and a person who attempted murder. They may end up convicting them of illegal weapons possession rather than terrorism simply because they were caught before they did anything.

My French is weak enough that I can’t say — it’s a tossup whether I can do a better job than Google. (Actually, Google has the edge). But there you are, for what it’s worth.

NEXT YEAR IN ORBIT: Rand Simberg offers a summary of the year in space, and some advice for next year. This piece is a must-read for space enthusiasts, and especially for NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe, and those people in Congress and the White House who deal with him.