WHY THEY HATE US: Reader Peter Kavaler sends along this photo from last year’s Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. Prince Abdullah should be forced to attend.

ORCHID says she doesn’t care about Salon anymore.

SPEAKING OF SPACE: Rand Simberg takes on people who think the human race isn’t fit to colonize the planets.

CNN HAS A POLL ON WHETHER THE SAUDIS ARE TRUSTWORTHY ALLIES: 78% say “no.”

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE DEMOCRATS: I’m watching CNN’s “Crossfire,” where Lori Garver (who I knew when she was Executive Director of the National Space Society, where I was once a board member) is squaring off with James Carville and Robert Park about space tourism. Park, not to be blunt, looks virtually senile, repeating the sound-bite “high-tech bungee jumping” over and over. Carville just doesn’t seem to get the idea of opening new markets.

The rap against Democrats is that they don’t care about baking the pie, only slicing it. Carville is living down to that.

RICH LOWRY SAYS the Saudis are bluffing. That’s right. Prince Abdullah warned that we might send the region “over a cliff.” He failed to consider that we might think that’s where it belongs.

UPDATE: Den Beste agrees:

He’s looking at the end of the Saud dynasty no matter which way things go and he’s hoping for some way out.

I don’t think he’s going to find one, though; I think that the House of Saud will soon be a stateless monarchy, living in wealthy exile.

I actually think this is on the optimistic side, from the Saudis’ point of view. But I don’t think the Saudis have reconciled themselves, yet, to the fact that they’re in an endgame where the only question is whether they will lose comfortably, or lose very uncomfortably.

BELLESILES UPDATE: Here’s an Associated Press story on Bellesiles.

UH-OH. Bad news from Gena Lewis.

HENRY COPELAND SAYS blogging is bigger than journalism. So there.

CORNEL WEST UPDATE: Man, when a pretentious Harvard professor can’t even get sympathy from the New York Observer it’s gotten bad. But here’s what NYO has to say about West:

It’s lucky for Cornel West that the Ivy League apparently has no shortage of universities willing to abandon academic standards in return for the dubious advantage of employing a publicity-loving con man. The latest dupe: Princeton University, which has just hired the black studies “scholar” away from Harvard University. Princeton is crowing about its “coup”; Harvard does not seem particularly distressed.

And West thought that Larry Summers was disrespecting him? He doesn’t know what he’s unleashed.

Er, well, by now he probably does, actually. And check out the conclusion:

Lawrence Summers deserves praise for acting like a conscientious academic leader, who is clearly strengthening Harvard by creating the conditions for a hack professor to relocate to Princeton. As for Princeton’s academic leaders, they have simply provided a home for America’s most prominent academic charlatan to sell his wares.

Advantage: Summers!

TONY ADRAGNA takes on vile antisemitic remarks at the International Committee of the Red Cross.

DRAWING THE RIGHT LESSON: A woman in Seattle shot an armed intruder. The neighbors gathered to discuss the happening. What lesson did they draw? That she should have called 911? That it’s wrong to “take the law into youer own hands?” Nope. “It also illustrates that ‘if you didn’t have a gun they could have been killed,’ she said.”

There’s hope for this country, folks.

NORWEGIAN ULTIMATUM: “Compensate us, or we shall flood Israel with trout, mackerel and critical UN resolutions!”

IF YOU’RE A JOURNALIST covering weblogs, or just interested in the whole phenomenon, you should bookmark this latest installment in the series Eric Olsen’s been doing. And follow the links to the earlier installments.

NOW EVEN THE EMORY WHEEL IS CONTRADICTING BELLESILES:

Professor of History Michael Bellesiles may have lied to the Wheel on at least two occasions last week while responding to questions regarding the University’s investigation into his work on guns in early America.

Bellesiles denied that he received “offers of help” from James Lindgren, a professor of law at Northwestern University (Ill.), when Lindgren initially learned that Bellesiles’ book, Arming America: Origins of a National Gun Culture concluded gun ownership rates were so low they were “mathematically impossible.”

Yet the Wheel has obtained an e-mail confirming Lindgren wrote Bellesiles on Nov. 11, 2000, offering to assist the Emory professor.

Boy, if you can’t trust a historian. . . .

THOUGH ARUNDHATI ROY may be an idiot, most Indians are not. Pejman Yousefzadeh, writing in TechCentralStation, says we should ally more closely with India. I agree, and in fact was saying so even before September 11.

IAN BURUMA administers a thorough and painful Fisking to Arundhati Roy in The New Republic. Excerpt:

There is one verbal tic that keeps recurring in Roy’s writings that may help us to understand her feelings–for that is what they are, more than coherent thoughts. She refers a great deal to India’s “ancient civilization,” usually to show how humiliating it is for an ancient people to defer to a jumped-up, uncivilized place such as the United States. About President Clinton’s visit to India, she observes: “He was courted and fawned over by the genuflecting representatives of this ancient civilization with a fervour that can only be described as indecent.” This speaks of the same snobbery that informed Roy’s remark on American television about Mickey Mouse and the mullahs.

Rich, rampant America shows up the relative weakness and backwardness of India. This is hard to take for a member of the intellectual or artistic elite, educated by nationalist professors, whose thoughts were often molded by British Marxists from the London School of Economics. The genuine popularity of American pop culture among the urban masses in India makes the elite feel marginal in their own country, which sharpens their sense of pique. For India, you could also read France, Italy, Japan, or even China. Thus Roy’s voice is less representative of the Third World than of a global intelligentsia, floating from conference to conference, moaning about the effects of globalization.

Yes, Conferenceville is a place. But not a very nice place, and an odd one from which to denounce globalization, though it appears to be a very popular address for those who wish to see the world more rooted.

CHARLES JOHNSON has even more good stuff than usual on his page. Rather than linking to any one item, I’ll just say: go there, and read.

MICKEY KAUS says he’s identified a huge loophole in McCain-Feingold. Hmm. Maybe InstaPundit.Com, LLC, will be a big political force on ’04!

BELLESILES UPDATE: Melissa Seckora is reporting that the Emory University investigation of historian Michael Bellesiles for fraud is progressing to a second stage, an investigation by prominent scholars from outside Emory.

This sounds to me like they’re looking at firing him.

UPDATE: On the other hand, a couple of readers speculate that they’re turning the case over to the American Historical Association, which might produce a whitewash. But while that’s possible, I don’t think so: this guy has been such an embarrassment, and so many people have pointed out so many obvious misrepresentations and fabrications, that I think a whitewash would send what little credibility the historical profession has left (sorry guys, but it’s been a bad year for historians) down the drain.

SPINSANITY IS TAKING AL GORE TO TASK for misrepresentations in his Earth Day speech. They note that Gore pretty much got a pass on his misleading statements from the mainstream media.

CH-CH-CH-CH-CHANGES: Chris Seamans explains why the old certainties of political thought have dissolved.

THE KASS COUNCIL is now officially a disaster. Leon Kass’s Presidential Council on Bioethics was supposed to advise the President on issues like cloning. But the President came out against cloning without waiting for the Council to come up with any recommendations. Now a member is complaining. And he’s right. I tried to give Kass and his council the benefit of the doubt in a column I wrote back in January. I shouldn’t have bothered.

HERE’S SOME GOOD NEWS, reported by Richard Willing in USA Today:

Arabic speakers, including hundreds of Arab-Americans, have flooded the FBI with applications for jobs as translators since Sept. 11, according to officials who say that some of those hired already are playing key roles in terrorism probes. . . . About 2,000 of the 11,000 people who applied to be agents in January and February said they spoke a foreign language, the bureau says. A bureau source says that many applicants appear to be foreign-born or first-generation Arab-Americans.

This is the traditional response of immigrants in wartime, of course, but for some reason it’s the disloyal behavior of groups like CAIR that gets all the attention.

SENATOR FRITZ “CASH & CARRY” HOLLINGS (D-DISNEY) has an oped in today’s New York Times arguing against free trade. Matthew Hoy administers a thorough Fisking.