TROLL ALERT: Brendan O’Neill is dissing Linux.

BRINK LINDSEY takes on Charles Krauthammer’s cloning column. It’s an unequal contest, and Brink comes out on top.

CRAIG SCHAMP has a compendium of links on the Gray Davis / Oracle scandal.

And we’re supposed to trust Larry Ellison with all our private information?

MARGARET WENTE says that Amnesty International has destroyed its credibility with its one-sided approach to Israel and the United States.

WALTER SHAPIRO delivers a blogger-like Fisking to Noam Chomsky’s book. Sample:

At a moment of intense patriotism, it is worth trying to decipher the roots of Chomsky’s against-the-grain appeal.

The secret certainly does not lie in Chomsky’s riveting prose style. The book was cobbled together in mid-October from Chomsky’s voluminous e-mail exchanges, primarily with foreign journalists. The repetitive format, consisting of naïve questions followed by self-serving answers, allows Chomsky to elude any rigorous explanation of what America should do in the face of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The MIT linguist may be a prophet without honor in his own country, but Chomsky is far from an adroit soothsayer in any language. Radiating the armchair pseudo-certainty that is his trademark, Chomsky predicts, “An attack against Afghanistan will probably kill a great many innocent civilians, possibly enormous numbers in a country where millions are already on the verge of death from starvation.”

Just in case any gullible reader missed his point, Chomsky helpfully adds, “Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism.”

OK, even great thinkers occasionally make mistakes. But Chomsky cannot even decide whether Osama bin Laden should be reviled or coddled with a tolerant understanding of the causes of his murderous fury.

Hmm. Maybe this is because Chomsky’s, you know, an idiot? Shapiro continues:

Chomsky is a master of false equivalence. High on his roster of American war crimes is the 1998 destruction of a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant in an abortive cruise missile attack against al-Qaeda. Chomsky claims that tens of thousands of Sudanese died because of the resulting lack of life-saving drugs. He dismisses with a flurry of rhetorical excess the American explanation that the misplaced attack was due to faulty intelligence.

In classic style, Chomsky wonders whether the 1958-61 Chinese famine should also be dismissed because “Mao did not ‘intend’ to kill millions of people.” In a few short sentences, Chomsky has implicitly likened an errant cruise missile to the worst horrors unleashed by the Chinese Communist government.

Why is anyone reading this tripe?

Maybe because, you know, they’re idiots too? Shapiro’s explanation is kinder and more reasoned than mine — but not necessarily inconsistent.

TAPPED deconstructs Will Saletan on robo-rats. Turnabout’s fair play, I guess.

GUIDANCE COUNSELORS: Less ethical than political consultants? Mitchell Webber identifies some pretty questionable behavior in a recent New York Times series, and wonders why it passes unremarked.

THE GREAT KAUSFILES SELLOUT made the front page of the New York Sun, reports Lori Anne Byrnes, who has posted the article on her blog.

GO TO MATT WELCH’S PAGE. Give him money.

JOSH MARSHALL responds to the Great Kaus Sellout by saying that he’s merging with AOL. Uh, dude, that one’s been done.

EUGENE VOLOKH has an op-ed on the Second Amendment in today’s Wall Street Journal. It’s excellent.

PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH wants to be the anti-Chomsky. You already are, Pejman — you’re rational, and you don’t live in a fantasyland.

TOM BELL responds to the E.U. barcode flag with some designs of his own.

READER RUDY BUNTIC writes:

In regards to Bill Lockyer, how can he can give money back to Oracle and then feel he is somehow cleansed enough to do an investigation of the California – Oracle scandal. Are we somehow to believe that he is free of conflict of interest because he gives $50,000 back? Obviously he can give the money back, clear Oracle of any impropriety and then get a bunch of fat checks in the mail from Oracle a year or two from now as a payback. It reminds me of John Ashcroft and Enron. He recused himself from the investigation of Enron because he took political donations from them when he was a Senator. Shouldn’t Lockyer recuse himself and hand over the investigation to someone who will actually investigate and not have a campaign to run?

I read your ‘About Me’ and figure your most recent book concerning political impropriety probably means you already thought of this, but I had to rant just in case.

I’ve never thought that giving the money back makes conflicts go away — and in fact, acting as if it does is the plainest admission that you are for sale. But politicians like this approach because it grants them easy absolution.

A READER SUGGESTS that I hold a contest for best blog-store item, and nominates this mousepad from WhattheHeck.Com.

Contests and prizes are more Andrew’s thing.

THE AMERICAN PROWLER takes on TAPPED regarding the relative treatment of Arafat and Musharraf.

MATTHEW HOY nominates himself for TAPPED’s list of liberal bloggers.

VIRGINIA POSTREL decries the lack of gender diversity among New York Times and Washington Post columnists. But she identifies one major publication that’s doing quite well.

AL QAEDA REDUX? The Hindustan Times reports that Pakistani intelligence officials think Al Qaeda is likely to strike soon with a bunch of new suicide attacks. Well, that would be typical. Just as U.S. pundits and politicians are starting to return to business as usual, this will remind the country that it’s still at war, and remind the world that these “scum” (to coin a phrase) are still out there. If the attacks are on Americans it will give America more room to maneuver diplomatically. If they’re on non-Americans (as in Pakistan ) they will produce additional pressure on the countries whose people are attacked to support the war. As I said, typically stupid.

Al Qaeda has shown some degree of operational skill, and gets a lot of points for persistence, and for being willing to learn from its mistakes. What it lacks completely is political judgment. But then, what do you expect?

DENISE HOWELL has this interesting observation on the tendency for legal documents to show up on the Web:

When attorneys begin to realize that, thanks to the Internet, their dispute-related correspondence may have a broader audience than they thought – even for writings that, unlike legal pleadings, are not part of the public record – this could have a dramatic, and positive, effect on the tenor and content of those missives.

Over the long term, that’s probably true. And no