GUN RIGHTS SUPPORTERS should be very unhappy with Bush, as the Justice Department punts on the D.C. gun ban.

Apparently Ashcroft’s view of the right to arms is like the beer in a beer commercial: you can pour it, show it brilliantly illuminated, talk about how good it is — in fact, do absolutely anything except actually drink it.

NETWORK HELP REQUEST: Okay, the home wireless network sort of works. About one time in ten the laptop connects fine. The other computer never does. Both can see the network, and report an excellent connection — but when I try to launch Explorer on the laptop, the MSN log-in appears every time; when I make it go away I can access Explorer only in offline mode. The other computer just returns a “page not found” response. I’ve spent a lot of time fiddling with the Windows network settings, to no avail. Any suggestions?

SPIES IN THE FBI? Howard Owens has some thoughts.

I’VE BEEN POINTING UP MUGABE’S MISDEEDS for quite some time here. The current New Yorker has a superb article on what’s going on in Zimbabwe, which is now up on the Web. I highly recommend it, though it’s pretty depressing. Mugabe makes quite clear that he regards Zimbabwe as his personal property, and that he’ll kill anyone who gets in the way, regardless of what it means for the people of Zimbabwe.

What’s worse is that he’s still getting a lot of support from South Africa and from South African political leaders. That bodes poorly for Zimbabwe, but it’s even worse for South Africa, because Zimbabwe has served as a groundbreaker and role-model for South Africa for the past couple of decades.

HENRY COPELAND is interested in seeing bloggers make money, and he’s got some plans.

BIZARRO WORLD, CONT’D: The New Republic is savaging the Pentagon brass for being unwilling to go to war. Okay, this is a longstanding issue, as their editorial points out, but still. . . .

Key passage:

But timidity is one thing; insubordination is another. The military establishment has crossed that line several times over the last decade–when a general named Colin Powell penned op-eds in 1992 cautioning policymakers against intervening in Bosnia; and in 1999, when the Army brazenly dragged its feet in delivering to Albania the Apache helicopters President Bill Clinton had ordered for the Kosovo campaign. And now it appears they are doing so once more.

There’s nothing worse than waging war in a half-assed fashion. Stephen Green said the other day that we’ve lost the initiative. I’m afraid he’s right.

If we lose this war, it’ll be because it was mismanaged. If that happens, we need to be sure that heads roll — from the White House, to the Pentagon, to the CIA. I agree with those who see the mideast turmoil as a distraction play intended to keep us from taking decisive action. Seems to be working.

The absence of rolling heads right now, as evidence of 9/11 screwups emerges in greater and greater quantities, is already worrisome.

EX-NAZI AND EX-U.N. SECRETARY GENERAL Kurt Waldheim (what? he’s still alive?) has been visiting Lebanon to hear complaints about Israel. Hmm. Perhaps there’s an important position awaiting Waldheim at the ICRC or the UNHRC. He seems to have the qualifications.

ANDREW SULLIVAN (whose permalinks are actually working now) weighs in on the Great Web Traffic Debate. Hey guys: all it takes is an open counter. And Mickey Kaus has responded to Sullivan’s “burly beer-buddy” Jonah Goldberg’s remarks on the traffic that Slate gets via MSN and MSNBC: “It’s called leveraging monopoly power, buddy! You got a problem with that?” You tell ’em, Mickey!

IT’S A KUTTNER-A-THON over at Kausfiles. That guy can’t get out from under Kaus’s eagle eye.

NOW THIS is sufficiently cool that it makes me wish I were young enough, and more importantly stupid enough, to do it myself. (Via Portage).

HAPPY FUN PUNDIT, perhaps inspired by my Garry Wills post from a couple of days ago, has posted a Willsian Latin-based reinterpretation of other parts of the Bill of Rights.

Hey, it’s as persuasive as the Wills approach. And I especially like the affirmation (as in “oath or affirmation”) supporting searches and seizures.

IT WAS A LOVELY EVENING: My daughter and I went to a carnival nearby (we’ve gotten a lot of those lately) where several stuffed bears were won (largely at the shooting gallery), unhealthy food was eaten, and a good time was had by all (well, both) as we killed time while my wife finished a late appointment. Then a nice dinner, several chapters of Harry Potter and some involved and difficult for me to follow play scenarios involving a lot of dolls and plastic horses. Not a suicide bomber in sight, either. Too bad that not everyone can say that.

EUGENE VOLOKH has noticed that the expansion of FBI surveillance powers announced today — strictly for terrorism-related investigation — is actually going to be used in drug and child pornography cases. Mission creep? Or misdirection?

KEVIN HOLTSBERRY says that my approach to teen sex is probably unworkable because our culture isn’t capable of demanding responsibility from teens.

ANOTHER NEWS WATCHBLOG: It’s called “ChronWatch” and it’s devoted to the San Francisco Chronicle. That should keep ’em busy.

ERIC OLSEN HAS A TRIBUTE to the National Spelling Bee. I was in the National Spelling Bee in eighth grade, placing number 28th. Sadly, I knew the word that I went out on, and just muffed it. That’s usually how it goes in spelling bees, though.

Though people correlate spelling ability with intelligence, it’s been my experience that there’s not all that much there. Oh, really dumb people usually can’t spell. But there are plenty of smart ones who are lousy spellers, too. I enjoyed the spelling bee, though, and even traded emails a few months ago with one of my fellow contestants whom I hadn’t seen since. She’s an actress now, and probably doesn’t get to make much use of her spelling skills in her work. But it was fun.

TEEN SEX! I got a couple of long letters on the Teen Sex piece that I’ve posted over at InstaPundit EXTRA! for your reading pleasure. A homeschooler liked the piece!

IAIN MURRAY says the BBC story on drugs and crime in London that I link to below is wrong.

DEMOSTHENES (no, not the dead one) says that lunar environmentalism is dumb, but he disagrees with my Teen Sex article, which he finds, well, too conservative I guess.

TED BARLOW is dissing the Supreme Court for its state sovereign immunity decisions. He’s right to dis them — but wrong to blame the Rehnquist Court in particular, which is just following a long line of stupid decisions in this area. This utterly screwed-up line of cases started with Hans v. Louisiana in 1890, and it’s been continued by every Court since, regardless of political position. I don’t know why, and I’ve asked a lot of law professors, most of whom seem mystified at the Court’s near-religious enthusiasm for extending state sovereign immunity way beyond the letter of the Eleventh Amendment.

It’s true, of course, that the Eleventh Amendment cases are a substantial degree of departure from the text for a Court with many justices who say they’re strict constructionists. (It’s so true, in fact, that I wrote a law review article saying that in 1992, called “Penumbral Reasoning on the Right,” in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review). But in a way this illustrates the meaninglessness of the term “judicial activism.” On the one hand, the Court is way outside the text of the Constitution, which can certainly be characterized as activist. On the other hand, its recent decisions are entirely consistent with a line of cases that’s over a hundred years old, which could be considered respectful of precedent and hence not activist at all.

ANDREW DODGE has a new series on rock & roll, heavy metal, and Darkwave. I wonder if he likes Digital Ritual? I’m a big fan of their “Gods and Monsters” and “Last Trip” (especially the “Heavy Metal Hardfloor edit”).

TRAFFIC, TRAFFIC, TRAFFIC! The USA Today item below has generated a lot of email, but I noticed this post by Jonah Goldberg over at The Corner about web traffic in which he compares Slate (which gets a lot of traffic via MSN) with USA Today, which gets a lot of readers via hotel placements. Provocative!

MARK ELLIOTT, circulation manager for USA Today, takes great exception to what I said earlier about print media inflating their paid circulation numbers:

As an circulation employee for USA TODAY I wanted to set the record straight regarding “free” papers and their “bundling” with hotels to count as paid. You make it sound as if it were a gimmick. They are counted as paid because they are paid for. They are bought and paid for by the hotel (at a slightly reduced rate for the large chains) for their customers. You can argue that many of those people would not normally buy a paper if one was not presented to them each morning but I don’t accept that. USA TODAY presents a fresh product each morning unique among its competition that is regarded as a must-have by the business traveler. Since the majority of hotels who offer this amenity serve the business community, I don’t feel there would be a significant drop off of circulation numbers should this practice end tomorrow.

Well, I don’t know about that. I appreciate Mr. Elliott’s point, but I’ve also gotten those papers when I stayed in hotels a lot more than I’ve bought them on my own. When you present your product free at someone’s door, they may read it or they may chuck it in the trash. I don’t think that it shows the same degree of reader interest as a subscription or a newsstand purchase. By way of comparison, if I were to spam InstaPundit content out to thousands of people — or have the spam bundled in with some other product or service (“subscribe to this porn site and get InstaPundit absolutely free!“) I don’t think it would demonstrate the same degree of interest as visits to this page.

I’ve got no grudge against USA Today, which I think is a lot better paper than many people realize. But I think this just underscores an important point: people argue about web stats, but older media bring even less information to the table about what people are reading. If I read Walter Shapiro’s column on the USA Today site, they know I’ve read it. If I buy a copy of the print edition to hold over my head because I don’t have an umbrella, I count as a “reader” of the whole thing even if I never open it.

Sadly, I don’t think there’s any leverage in the InstaPundit / Net Porn bundling scheme, either.

MORE ON MARTIAN WATER: The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting wrapup story on the subject here.

I think that — assuming this turns out to be true, as seems highly likely — this will turn out to be the big story of the year in many ways. But that probably won’t be apparent for decades.

BRINK LINDSEY, obviously no suckup, says that Joseph Stiglitz’s new book is very bad. This is a good argument for places like the Cato Institute, where Brink works. Stiglitz is a very famous economist, and dissing his book this way could be a damaging career move for an academic economist at many universities. At a think-tank, though, such considerations don’t exist in the same way. Think tanks, especially non-PC think tanks, thus help to promote intellectual diversity — which to me seems like a good thing.