THE SURPRISING SIMILARITY BETWEEN SAMUEL JOHNSON AND GEORGE PATTON: Courtesy of Horsefeathers.

DATELINE has a pretty interesting segment on about the airline passengers and crew who subdued Richard Reid. Turn it on, if you’re interested.

POLITICIANS, MUSICIANS, AND SMALL PLANES: Eric Olsen has some observations.

THE POWER OF THE INTERNET: Reader Jim Herd points out that the successful roundup of the Symbionese Liberation Army was largely the result of pressure by one guy with a website. I haven’t followed the case closely, but that seems to be largely correct.

UPDATE: Reader Dale Wetzel points out that this website deserves a mention, too.

STUPID (ANTI) RAVE TRICKS: TalkLeft reports on what happened in Wisconsin.

UPDATE: A reader notes that judges and prosecutors tend to go to more traditional music venues, where you’d never find anyone using drugs.

VEGARD VALBERG has posted what he calls “The Grandmother of All Mistings.”

MATTHEW HOY is pushing a bone-marrow registry drive for a friend. And The Indepundit has more information on bone marrow donation generally.

BILL QUICK explains how Bush can blow it by 2004. Not that I think it’s likely to happen.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON ON THE SELF-DESTRUCTION OF THE ANTI-AMERICAN LEFT:

The post-9/11 animus from a Norman Mailer (the Twin Towers were like ugly buck teeth), Noam Chomsky (America planned to kill “millions” in Afghanistan), or Michael Moore (there were few Bush voters at the World Trade Center) — followed by gleeful predictions by others of U.S. failure against the Taliban — is now come to logical fruition over the toppling of the odious Saddam Hussein. And what one has to conclude from the present venom is that anti-Americanism is neither logical nor empirical. Indeed, it is a fundamentalist secular religion, not a reasoned stance, one entirely inconsistent and unpredictable in its choice of friends and foes — except for one constant: Whatever America does, it hates.

We are learning that resistance never really entailed opposition to fascism at all, much less the need for intervention to support democracy, but was simply a strange desire to vent displeasure with our own culture. That so many of these ideological teenagers mad at their opulent and indulgent parents are affluent suburbanites suggests the deleterious effects of leisure and wealth; that so many enjoy the appurtenances of nice cars, houses, and travel denotes abject hypocrisy; that so many mindlessly repeat cant and fad reflects the power of belonging to a clique that promises status by being more “sophisticated” and “subtle” than ordinary Americans; that so many demand utopian perfection reminds us that their god Reason is an unforgiving totem; that so many are shrill and angry suggests that they seek global causes to assuage personal unhappiness and anger at a system that has not met their own high demands upon it. . . .

Face it: Slobodan Milosevic, Mullah Omar, Yasser Arafat, and Saddam Hussein — not the ghosts of the thousands of their innocent dead — all prefer Ramsey Clark to George Bush. We are seeing nothing less than quite literally the end of an era — witnessed by the intellectual suicide of an entire generation, who in their last gasps are proving they have been not very moral people all along.

Yep.

UPDATE: A reader sends this link to a Tom Wolfe essay that’s worth reading.

DALE AMON OBSERVES:

Political Correctness is not a matter of what is said; it is a matter of who says it. The anointed are “allowed” freedoms of speech unavailable to the hoi polloi. Had it been myself on ITV news, making the same remark, I would be pilloried for it.

Do not get me wrong: I am not castigating Michael Moore for this remark. I am merely pointing out there is an inherent asymmetry and illogic to the Left’s position on Freedom of Speech. The fact is, I agree with Michael Moore. Laura Ingraham is better looking than he is.

No argument here.

GARRISON KEILLOR, NORM COLEMAN, AND WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE DEMOCRATIC LEFT: Minnesota blogger Mitch Berg has some observations.

Rachel Lucas, meanwhile has some of her own regarding Terry McAuliffe, author of the Wellstone rally debacle.

THE TRIP TO NYC WAS FINE: Nice, smooth nonstop flight. Got into Newark before 8:30, was in Manhattan by 9. The taping for PBS’s “Media Matters” program on weblogs went well. When the producer originally called, I told him that I thought the story idea was great, but that they were going to have a hard time making it visually interesting.

This is why they’re TV pros and I’m not. The taping was a far cry from Larry King Live: in fact, it’s probably as close as I’ll get to making a rock video unless my music hobby really takes off. They had fog machines, various bizarre lighting effects, front- and back-projection setups, and a bunch of stuff that, had it been describe do me, would have seemed dumb but that actually looked pretty good when I saw it on the monitors. We’ll see how the program turns out, but I was impressed with what I saw.

Oliver Willis was there, too. I missed Anil Dash, who was there the day before, and Megan McArdle, who got there after a I left to catch my flight home.

Alas, I might as well have stayed. My flight home, along with a lot of other flights, was cancelled because of weather and I wound up spending the night at the Newark Airport Mariott. Not bad at all, as airport hotels go, but not where I would have chosen to spend the night. Got back this morning about ten.

I could have blogged from the Mariott’s “business center,” but at some outrageous per-minute rate. They had high-speed connections in the rooms, but I didn’t take the laptop, since I didn’t expect to have any free time anyway. Oh, well.

More later. Here’s the Media Matters homepage, though they don’t have anything about the show up there yet. They’re promising quicktime video clips soon; the show itself will run in January.

I’M HOME, SOMEWHAT LATE THANKS TO UNITED AIRLINES. MORE LATER.

BLOGGUS INTERRUPTUS: I may manage a post or two later tonight or tomorrow morning, but I’m catching an early flight to NYC tomorrow to be interviewed by the PBS show “Media Matters” — about weblogs, no surprise. If I get some free time I’ll post a few things, but since it’s an up-and-back in one day, free time may be at a premium. In my absence, visit the many fine weblogs in the links to the left. And don’t miss this special edition of Will Vehrs’ Punditwatch on FoxNews.

UPDATE: I’ve heard from Blogosphere favorite Rachael Klein! She emailed to let me know that she’s still at Berkeley, but that she’s given up her column because she’s trying hard to finish her senior thesis and graduate. She misses it, though, and I’ve encouraged her to start a weblog or start writing for Blogcritics or something. Anyway, I asked her to weigh in on the Great Cornell Vibrator controversy, and she’s sent some comments by email. I’ve posted them over at InstaPundit EXTRA! Also, Austin Bay has a comment on how Al Qaeda zealots find themselves fighting American robots — and losing.

And sheesh, over 100,000 pageviews yesterday, the day after the election. Go figure.

SOME ADVICE FOR BUSH: Jonah Goldberg warns that the Republicans need to avoid overreaching, as Republicans have done in the past when things went unexpectedly well. (I linked to a similar warning from John Ellis earlier today). Democrats and their friends in the media, after all, will be waiting to pounce on anything that will let them paint the Republicans as corrupt pawns of greedy big business.

I think he’s right, and in particular I think that the Bush Administration needs to do something dramatic that will position it on the side of consumers against Evil Big Business. And I have just the thing: The Bush Administration should take on the crooks and thugs of the recording and movie industries. And it should do so on the side of artists and consumers.

It’s widely believed that the recording industry shafts its artists. As Ken Layne has pointed out, when 9,000 artist accounts were audited, 8,999 were found to have involved underpayments to the artists. Artist retirement funds have been underfunded, too — sometimes to ridiculous levels. And the record companies recently settled a price-fixing suit brought by state attorneys general.

Meanwhile the entertainment industries are trying to take control of people’s computers, televisions, and stereos. Consumers are gouged for ticket prices, radio is ruined by payola and other shady practices, and pretty much everyone knows that the whole industry is rotten to the core. (Heck, it was the topic of the very first post on InstaPundit). And by siding with artists, the Administration will be able to split an industry that’s usually united against the Republicans right down the middle. And voters identify with actors and musicians much more than with the suits who run the record and movie industries.

By taking on this big business that everyone has come to hate, the Bush Administration can position itself as a tribune of the people against greedy corporate interests. (And make media assaults on the Administration easy to discount as a self-interested response to its efforts to enforce the law). That they happen to be greedy corporate interests that give generously to Democrats will only make it more appealing.

A BLOGGER GETS SUED. Scientology is involved.

This looks pretty thuggish to me. And it’s certainly lowering my opinion of Front Sight, an organization that I’ve always thought well of up to now.

READER BRIAN ERST says he’s found my secret identity. Damn, I thought dropping the “n” from my first name would throw people off.

MICHAEL MOORE is a failure as a prognosticator:

Sunday, November 3rd, 2002

Years from Now, They’ll Call It “Payback Tuesday”

Dear Friends,

Well, folks, Tuesday is the day! The day that George W. gets taught a long overdue lesson. The day that we, the MAJORITY — the 52% who never elected him — get our chance to reclaim a bit of our former democracy (back when ALL the votes used to be counted).

What if, on Tuesday, all of us, regardless of our political stripe, and just for the fun of it, decided to serve one big-ass eviction notice that said, you have two years to remove yourself from the premises-and you had better not damage anything on your way out?

I think we can give Bush the Mother of all Shellackings on Tuesday.

I think this is on a par with a lot of Moore’s other factual claims. Better read it before he takes it down. . . .

UPDATE: Some readers say that Moore’s screed should be read as a call to arms, rather than a prediction. Of course, just makes it a different kind of failure.

ANOTHER UPDATE: And quite a failure it was: UPI says the race overall went 53-47 for the GOP over the Dems. Hmm. . . think the people who set so much store by the popular-vote totals in 2000 will be talking about this figure? Nope. They’re in too great a state of denial. Which will only help the Republicans long-term, of course. Eric Raymond has some thoughts on the Dems’ disconnect with reality, and why it’s a deeper problem than most commentators seem to have realized.

DAN HANSON probes the darkside of the election results.

IN ANSWER TO A QUESTION POSED BY A READER BELOW, Gerhard Schroder has called President Bush to offer his congratulations. It’s not clear, though, whether Bush took the call. . . .

THE BARBARIANS AT THE GATES: Of Paris, that is. This is the logical consequence of a general policy of appeasement, and of the state telling everyone not to get involved in matters that it then proceeds to neglect itself. It’s New York, 1977, all over again. Only worse.

THREE PAKISTANI MEN HAVE BEEN ARRESTED for trying to buy Stinger missiles on behalf of Al Qaeda.

UPDATE: Here’s more. Ashcroft is wrong, though — this isn’t a reason to join the war on terrorists to the war on drugs. It’s a reason to get rid of the war on drugs, and thus deprive terrorists of a covert source of funds.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Andrew Stuttaford agrees, writing:

Uncle Sam’s drug warriors have trashed thousands of lives and squandered billions of dollars in their pointless and self-defeating crusade. They are also now, it is clear, a growing menace to national security. It’s long past time to say no to them.

Yes, it is.

VINOD VALLOPPILLIL has a link-filled post on what should come next with Iraq. Excerpt:

If Saddam were a white guy named Milosevic, the entire friggin’ EU, NATO, and US military would already be in the country saving the populace from this him. Alas, Milosevic didn’t have the Race Card, the Religion Card, and the Anti-West Cards working for him. The usual Euro/leftist voices of humanitarianism fall strangely silent when dealing with “brown tyrants for brown people.”

Indeed.

HERE’S THE TEXT of the proposed U.S. resolution on Iraq.

WHIGGINGOUT emails to point out that his November 2 predictions held up better than those of the experts. Yep.

UPDATE: Dodd Harris is claiming vindication too!

No email from Dick Morris yet. . . .