JEFF JARVIS IS EXPERIMENTING with video blogging. Very interesting.

PIETER K EMAILS that although there are no clips from his CD available on Amazon, you can hear samples here on the Breakbeat Science page. My favorite cut is “Numina,” but you should also check out “Stars from Aircraft.” I actually like ’em all.

THE LOTT CONTRAST: Reader Tom Wright emails:

This may not be a widely held view but I think the Trent Lott episode is a huge plus for the Republican Party. It may gain them nothing at the polls but at least they have proved that they are capable of embarrassment and shame when on of their number demonstrates an unfitness for his office.

Tardy though it may have been, the disgust and outrage shown by Republicans over Sen. Lott’s remarks contrasted with the Democrats’ studied indifference to the past comments by Sen. Byrd or the vileness spewed by Rep. McKinney shows that while both parties may have bigots, at least the Republicans are ashamed or theirs.

Yes, I think that’s how it will play. And I wonder, now, if more will be made of the Bonior/McDermott trip to Baghdad?

UPDATE: Eric Alterman sort of agrees:

Actually, this is the worst possible solution for the Democrats, who won’t have Trent Lott to kick around anymore as leader, but also won’t be getting a Democratic replacement in his seat.

I think that’s right, too.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Virginia Postrel compares Trent Lott and Mary Landrieu. It’s a comparision to which a lot of other members of the Senate are subject.

And Daniel Drezner congratulates Josh Marshall — who I think really started the ball rolling — and says this will be good for the Republicans in the long term.

NOW THAT TRENT LOTT has paid for his stupid remarks, perhaps Senator Patty Murray should be next:

“We’ve got to ask, why is this man (Osama bin Laden) so popular around the world?,” said Murray, who faces re-election in 2004. “Why are people so supportive of him in many countries … that are riddled with poverty?

“He’s been out in these countries for decades, building schools, building roads, building infrastructure, building day care facilities, building health care facilities, and the people are extremely grateful. We haven’t done that.

“How would they look at us today if we had been there helping them with some of that rather than just being the people who are going to bomb in Iraq and go to Afghanistan?”

Yeah, it’s not as if she’s ever voted on a foreign aid bill or anything. Actually, many of the roads in Afghanistan were built by Americans. I have an uncle who did that, and also trained Afghans in construction and equipment maintenance, back during the 1970s. Didn’t seem to make much of a difference. But I guess I shouldn’t expect Murray to know about that stuff — she’s only a Senator, after all.

UPDATE: Reader Brandon Bigelow writes:

Does Patty Murray read the federal budgets she’s been voting on? The United States may not contribute a large amount of money to foreign aid as a percentage of GDP, but the amounts are significant in real dollars. Did she just miss the $2.4 billion we spent in the Middle East and North Africa in FY00, the $1.8 billion in FY01, or the estimated $1.7 billion in FY02? I am guessing Osama bin Laden, with all the hospital, orphanages, schoolhouses and shelters he built didn’t come close. See www.usaid.gov/country/ane/mena_tables.html for summaries of expenditures.

How much is enough for Patty Murray and her fellow travelers? Will people stop flying jets into the side of our buildings if only we give them $5 billion in foreign aid annually? Or could the conflict between the West and the Middle East be about a little bit more than total cash expenditures?

I honestly think that for some people — and Murray is probably one — it’s hard to imagine that anything matters more than federal expenditures.

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER: What should have happened last week has happened today — Trent Lott has stepped down as Majority Leader.

Bill Frist is the favorite to succeed him, which is a good deal for everyone involved except Frist — and the Democrats, who would have rather kept Lott around. Lame efforts to tar all Republicans as Klansmen-in-disguise will continue for a while, but will peter out over the holidays with no effect. And they should, because it wasn’t the Democrats who got Lott removed.

Unlike the Democrats with Clinton, the Republicans have purged themselves of someone who didn’t belong in the office he held. The failure to do so cost the Democrats greatly. I think that the Republicans, meanwhile, will reap benefits from their action.

MASS ARRESTS? Bigwig writes:

Lets be generous with the numbers and assume that all the Muslims in SoCal are part of that 600,000. That means that out of the entire population, 0.16% of them are being held. For every 100,000 Muslims in Southern California, about 116 got arrested. That number is….shockingly low. For the year 2000, the average rate of arrests per 100,000 total population was 3,427.5

So, in reality, SoCal Muslims are exemplary citizens, or the INS is shockingly inept. I’ll take both choices, thank you. What I do expect, frankly, is for Muslim spokesman to quote these numbers with pride, pointing out that the American Muslim community is among the most law-abiding in the nation.

Bigwig expects a lot. . . .

He’s not that happy with the INS, either.

UPDATE: Chad Seltzer says Bigwig’s math is based on erroneous assumptions.

EURO-ANTISEMITISM ALERT:

Revelations of the brutal torture and murder of a teenager in eastern Germany blamed on neo-Nazis has sent shock-waves through the country.

Marius Schoeberl, who was 16, was killed apparently because he looked like a Jew.

His severely mutilated body was discovered in a farm silage pit in the remote village of Potzlow this summer.

Two brothers aged 17 and 23 and another 17-year-old from the village were recently found guilty of the murder.

The court was told that the boys were listening to neo-Nazi music, with its angry lyrics and furious sound, as well as drinking alcohol, before they set off into the night in search of a victim. . . .

They called him ‘un-German’, ‘a pest’ and ‘a Jew’. They dragged him to a deserted farmhouse, tortured and killed him – and then they went home to sleep.

The story paints this as a problem of the “extreme right,” but given the rise of antisemitism in polite European society, I think that’s a bit misleading.

WEAPONS OF MASS ANNOYANCE: An article in Wired News argues that cyberterrorism is a distinctly overrated threat.

Yeah, most computer-related stuff doesn’t work well enough for terrorism to register anyway. Kind of like threatening to cause traffic jams in L.A.

MICKEY KAUS writes on why — and how — Lott must go:

Lott, in his flailing, destructive attempt at self-preservation, didn’t quite equate opposition to race preferences with racism. But he did equate support of race preferences with opposition to racism. That’s why, as someone who thinks race preferences do far more harm than good, I worry that it’s not quite enough for the Republican Senate to simply vote Lott out of his leadership positon with “a brief statement explaining what they did and why they did it.” A brief statement would have sufficed if Lott’s only sin were his Thurmond tribute. But his subsequent compensatory embrace of preferences needs to be repudiated also, in memorably strong terms. The most reliable way for that to be done is for President Bush to do it himself.

Yep. I understand why Bush has been reluctant to tread on the Senate’s toes. But it’s time for him to provide some adult supervision.

I WAS GOING TO BLOG on the immigration-related arrests of Arab men in California, but I haven’t had time to give it the treatment it deserves. Eugene Volokh has some thoughts, though.

In brief, my observations are: (1) This is hardly the Japanese-American internment revisited. First, they’re not citizens, or even legal residents as best I can tell. And there are only a few hundred to perhaps a thousand of them. (2) These guys are all charged with being in violation of some immigration rule or another — in short, they’ve been arrested because they’re believed to be breaking the law. You may think it’s a stupid law, and a bad idea to arrest people for breaking it — as some might think with regard to arresting someone for having a shotgun with a barrel 1/4″ shorter than the legal minimum, and yes, such arrests do happen. But it hardly represents a fascistic breakdown in the rule of law. At least, if such a breakdown has occurred, it occurred when complicated and often contradictory laws were passed and then not generally enforced, not when these guys were arrested. (3) Inviting people to show up voluntarily for fingerprinting and then arresting a bunch of them seems to me to be a strategy that only works once. If the Feds knew that, then do they have some unstated reason for cracking down on illegal immigrants from Middle Eastern countries in these places and at this time? Possibly. This may be yet another small sign of coming war, and a preemption effort aimed at catching terrorist sleepers. (The other possibility, of course, is that the Feds are idiots, and that’s one never to be discounted, especially where the INS is concerned.)

Beyond that, I don’t know enough to have a clear opinion. More later, perhaps.

TOM HOLSINGER WRITES: “America’s conquest of Iraq will be a gradual process, not an event, and has probably begun.” Very interesting column.

READER PAUL STINCHFIELD sends another hate crime story.

HOLY SH*T: Andrew Sullivan raised nearly $80,000 in his “pledge week” campaign. And I was happy with a few hits to the paypal button!

Well, this should prove that it’s possible for someone to make a living at blogging, anyway.

RANDY PAUL has been emailing me for months with constructive criticism. Now he’s got his own blog focusing (mostly) on Latin America.

I’VE BEEN READING TONY PIERCE’S BOOK, which came in the mail today. I got copy 49/125, and it’s autographed, so my retirement is taken care of. I figure it’ll fetch a cool million quatlus at Sotheby’s by the time I’m ready to quit my day job and travel the galaxy.

I also popped Pieter K’s CD in the car today and listened to most of it. It’s quite cool — vaguely like Thievery Corporation, but somehow both funkier and more cerebral, even though that sounds like a contradiction. I like it very much. Between the two, it was an all-blogger-entertainment day.

I like the CD player, too. The old CD player died — the Passat’s cupholder is perilously close to the dash, and a bad pothole splashed my daughter’s Sprite into the tape-player opening, which produced irreversible death. That was, in a way, a good thing. I replaced the original — which had the changer in the back — with a new one that still has the changer but also has a slot in the dash. The rear-mounted CD changer is one of those things that sounds like a good idea, but that leaves you listening to the same CDs over and over.

Anyway, I had planned to finish grading papers from my National Security Law seminar this afternoon, and I still have a couple to go, and it’s all Tony’s fault. Bloggers are good at occupying your spare moments even when you’re offline, apparently.

KEN LAYNE’S POST ON BUSH ADMINISTRATION PERSONNEL POLICY is an absolute must-read. Excerpt:

But it’s also more damning evidence of Washington’s tin ear. People can and will disagree on all sorts of things, but something like this Trent Lott outrage pretty much puts everybody on the same page, from Atrios to Andrew Sullivan, Krugman to Kaus. Yet Lott is still in power. (He’ll probably be gone by the weekend, but it should’ve happened last week. Or 22 years ago.)

There’s much, much more.

MAX POWER HAS MOVED to MaxPower.nu — adjust your bookmarks accordingly.

SOME INTERESTING DMCA-RELATED NEWS at BlogCritics. Check it out.

THIS STORY suggests that claims the FBI was trying too hard not to offend the Saudis before September 11th are well-founded. I’d like to disbelieve this story, but sadly it’s all too believable. Excerpts:

In a dramatic interview with ABCNEWS, FBI special agents and partners Robert Wright and John Vincent say they were called off criminal investigations of suspected terrorists tied to the deadly bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa. U.S. officials say al Qaeda was responsible for the embassy attacks and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

“September the 11th is a direct result of the incompetence of the FBI’s International Terrorism Unit. No doubt about that. Absolutely no doubt about that,” Wright said. “You can’t know the things I know and not go public.”

In the mid-1990s, with growing terrorism in the Middle East, the two Chicago-based agents were assigned to track a connection to Chicago, a suspected terrorist cell that would later lead them to a link with Osama bin Laden. Wright says that when he pressed for authorization to open a criminal investigation into the money trail, his supervisor stopped him.

“Do you know what his response was? ‘I think it’s just better to let sleeping dogs lie,'” said Wright. “Those dogs weren’t sleeping. They were training. They were getting ready.”

The FBI says its handling of the matter was appropriate at the time.

Then there’s this:

Perhaps most astounding of the many mistakes, according to Flessner and an affidavit filed by Wright, is how an FBI agent named Gamal Abdel-Hafiz seriously damaged the investigation. Wright says Abdel-Hafiz, who is Muslim, refused to secretly record one of al-Kadi’s suspected associates, who was also Muslim. Wright says Abdel-Hafiz told him, Vincent and other agents that “a Muslim doesn’t record another Muslim.”

“He wouldn’t have any problems interviewing or recording somebody who wasn’t a Muslim, but he could never record another Muslim,” said Vincent.

Wright said he “was floored” by Abdel-Hafiz’s refusal and immediately called the FBI headquarters. Their reaction surprised him even more: “The supervisor from headquarters says, ‘Well, you have to understand where he’s coming from, Bob.’ I said no, no, no, no, no. I understand where I’m coming from,” said Wright. “We both took the same damn oath to defend this country against all enemies foreign and domestic, and he just said no? No way in hell.”

Far from being reprimanded, Abdel-Hafiz was promoted to one of the FBI’s most important anti-terrorism posts, the American Embassy in Saudi Arabia, to handle investigations for the FBI in that Muslim country.

The FBI just isn’t up to the war on terrorism. I’d like to think that this culture of political ass-covering and political correctness is a thing of the past, but I doubt it, considering that no heads have rolled for these failures.

And what does Abdel-Hafiz think the law-enforcement agencies in Muslim countries do? This guy should be fired if the story is true.

MICKEY KAUS PSYCHOANALYZES JAMES CARVILLE and also notes: “There’s something offensive (and retro) in Lott acting as if African-Americans, as opposed to all Americans, were the people harmed by his remarks.”

MEMO TO JONAH GOLDBERG: I am, by pretty much any reasonable standard, a former liberal. Heck, I was president of Students For Choice on my undergraduate campus, and was at one point a card-carrying member of the Democratic Party. Nor am I, by any reasonable definition, a conservative today — well, I might be one of those “Stephen Green” conservatives who support gay marriage, drug legalization, cloning research and the elimination of excise taxes on alcohol (actually, I made that last one up, but I imagine Stephen would be willing to add it to the platform). But I don’t think many more traditional conservatives would count that.

Mostly, I’m a proud member of the anti-idiotarian party — which is growing by leaps and bounds, as best I can tell. And which, judging by the likes of Sean Penn and Trent Lott, won’t lack for targets anytime soon.

TRENT LOTT IS IN SO MUCH TROUBLE that Christian bloggers are emailing me links to parody websites making fun of him.

NORAH VINCENT, still smarting from a bogus accusation of plagiarism a while back, thinks that the Australian High Court decision in the Gutnick case will bring some discipline to “blowhard bloggers.” Actually, though, I think she has it exactly backward. The more likely result of widespread transnational regulation of the Internet will be to limit the blogosphere to people who are judgment proof, or successfully anonymous, neither of which is likely to cut down on the number of bogus accusations. (Here’s a link to my piece in The Australian on what the case is likely to mean.)

The Washington Post, meanwhile, has a pretty good feature on legal issues relating to bloggers. I encourage people to read it.

ELI LILLY UPDATE: Ellen Miller of TomPaine.Com emails:

It’s easy for Dick Armey to say he did it — he’s a lame duck with no accountability. And in a way, he did ALLOW it to happen. But what TomPaine.com is looking for is THE PERSON WHO *ASKED* ARMEY to ALLOW it to happen. THAT is the person we want to finger. Keep searching…

Dang. So much for the 350Z this week, I guess. But, the above remarks notwithstanding, I think that my work here is finished. And I now definitely regard this as a phony issue.

UPDATE: Speaking of phony, reader John Norton points out this from the TomPaine.Com website:

Democracy requires accountability, so TomPaine.com is offering a $10,000 reward to the first person who proves the identity of the Eli Lilly Bandit — the >>member of Congress responsible for inserting the company’s special provision<<. Mail submissions to PO Box 53303, Washington, D.C. 20009. The complete terms and conditions of this offer are posted at www.TomPaine.com.

(His emphasis). He adds:

Sounds like you are in for that Z Car.

Flood the Zone!!!!

Yep, TomPaine seems to have a Carbolic Smoke Ball problem — though the Z-car routine is a joke, especially as I promised the reader who emailed me the CNN link that I’d see the reward money went to him in the unlikely event that they paid up. Which seems to be just as unlikely as I figured — and at any rate, I didn’t communicate by mail, as their terms-and-conditions seem to require. Had I been serious about claiming the reward, I would have done so.

Still, they were awfully quick to change the terms here, weren’t they? Another “broken dot-com promise?”

HOW, ER, UNFORTUNATE.