HERE’S A PAPER ON BIOLOGICAL TERRORISM that should have special appeal to Melissa Schwartz and Orchid.

TED BARLOW (permalinks not working — you Blogger types need to call Stacy Tabb and find something more reliable) says that I was wrong to cite Media Pundit’s take on the Harken affair.

Barlow may be right: I missed it, being blissfully unaware of the news while on vacation last week, and I haven’t really caught up. Barlow does, however, say that those discounting this scandal should apologize for hyping Whitewater.

I hope he doesn’t mean me. I never thought much of Whitewater — in fact, my 1997 book The Appearance of Impropriety: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business and Society (Free Press) was spurred in part by my belief that too much was being made of minor ethical lapses in the Clinton Administration. Lanny Davis has even used it as a text in his political communications class at GWU.

So I don’t think I can be accused of being a premature Clinton-basher. It was only later that I came to believe that Clinton was a sleazeball’s sleazeball, but that’s another story, and it doesn’t have much to do with Whitewater.

In the meantime, will all those (er, all us?) who said Whitewater was no big deal now change their stories, too?

NONE DARE CALL IT TERRORISM: My FoxNews column can be read now, though it’s technically for tomorrow.

REBECCA BLOOD nails it:

First a Department of Homeland Security and now a Corporate Fraud Task Force (or the Committee for Corporate Feasance, as I like to call it)…. And I thought that throwing more goverment at problems was the hallmark of a Democrat administration.

If only it were so. It was Nixon who presided over what scholars of administrative law call the “regulatory explosion” of the early 1970s. And he did it for political reasons that, I’m afraid, resemble those motivating the Bush Administration.

UPDATE: Nick Denton had a similar reaction.

STEVEN DEN BESTE has responded to an earlier post by Group Captain Lionel Mandrake on why Switzerland was never invaded. I tend to agree with Den Beste, though I think he’s a bit optimistic regarding the range at which Swiss soldiers could kill Germans.

IAIN MURRAY sends this link to a piece on “Air Rage” from 1999 in which he observed: ” Air rage, insofar as it exists at all, is an invention of airlines and the media, covering up a series of underlying problems with the industry as a whole.”

And it’s only gotten worse.

ERIC ALTERMAN wants to know how I can call Hugo Chavez a dictator when he was elected to office.

What does that have to do with anything? Hitler was elected to office.

Chavez is no Hitler, but he’s been using, ahem, extralegal methods including the shooting of unarmed protestors and the creation of unofficial armed gangs to intimidate his opponents. Sounds dictatorial to me. (Points off for the snarky Bush dig, too.)

And back atcha, Eric: would Ann Coulter really be “in jail” for her inflammatory comments if she were a lefty?

UPDATE: Brian Carnell notes that Chavez celebrated the 10th anniversary of his own failed 1992 coup attempt earlier this year, suggesting that it’s a bad idea to lean too hard on Chavez’s democratic bona fides: “Yeah, it must have been the CIA that put those thoughts of military coups into the heads of Chavez’s opponents, since Chavez himself is such a firm, outspoken supporter of democracy.”

Of course, people keep trying to tell us that Yasser Arafat is a democratically elected leader, too.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Several people have written to say that Hitler wasn’t elected. This is only sort of true. Hitler was originally appointed as Chancellor by Hindenburg in a busted-coalition situation. But that was legitimate under the Weimar constitution, and elections that confirmed Hitler’s power followed, as this capsule history from the BBC makes clear:

When he took office, Hitler was leading a coalition government. There were only three Nazis apart from himself. He immediately called a general election to try to win a majority.

On 27th February, just a week before the election, the Reichstag caught fire and burnt down. A communist, Franz van der Lubbe was arrested inside. Hitler used this as an excuse to arrest many members of the Communist Party, his main opponents.

The general election took place on 5th March 1933. the Nazis won 288 seats. This was not a majority, but 52 Nationalists supported them. At the first meeting of the Reichstag on 23rd March, the 81 Communists stayed away. Hitler could now do as he liked. . . .

When President Hindenburg died in August 1934, Hitler was finally able to gain total power and combined the posts of chancellor and president, giving himself the title of Fuhrer.

So unless you regard the parliamentary system, or at least coalition governments under a parliamentary system, as democratically illegitimate, I think it’s fair to say that Hitler was democratically elected. Sure, he behaved undemocratically once elected, but so has Chavez (and so has Arafat, whose “election” was far less legitimate than this) which was my point.

GRAY DAVIS UPDATE: Matthew Hoy says he’s trying to destroy a small newspaper that criticized him.

UPDATE: Daniel Wiener says Davis has the Democratic party scared over his vow to sign the “little Kyoto” bill, which Dems think will create referendum problems in November.

GOOD NEWS / BAD NEWS: RonK sends this Wharton study which finds U.S. corporate reports the cleanest in 31 countries.

That’s a response to Gerhard Schroder’s barbs, but it does make me wonder about the state of foreign markets.

TIM BLAIR says he’s figured out why Salon is folding.

JAMES LILEKS has some thoughts on realistic war games:

While doing a radio interview about computer-game violence the other day, I came up with a good definition of a “realistic” war game: they ship 45,000 copies, and only 15,000 of the games allow you to proceed past the beach. That’s it. No refunds, either. You get off the landing craft; your screen goes black; your computer seizes up and cannot be rebooted. Game over, man.

I don’t play computer war games, but this sounds like an idea that won’t sell.

JUST RAN ACROSS this amusing warblogger piece.

MORE ON AIRLINE SECURITY: Reader Dave Ragsdale writes:

Regarding the America West incident and general airport security rudeness, the point that security personnel aren’t even faking being professional and courteous anymore reminds me of a story Bill O’Reilly told on his radio show last week. His bag was being searched by the security guard, and when the search was done she began stuffing his clothes back in as though it were a laundry hamper. O’Reilly politely asked her to replace things the way she had found them, and she snapped, “Come over here,” and pulled him out of the line. Of course O’Reilly wasn’t having any of it and quickly called a cop over and demanded to speak to her supervisor and was ready to talk to the airline about her unprofessionalism. But the idea that a polite request to put items back neatly into a suitcase should trigger that kind of hostility and abuse to a passenger doesn’t seem very suprising these days.

To be fair, my experience with the security folks has been uniformly good, and I’ve been uniformly polite. But by all accounts there’s a lot of power-tripping going on by some of these folks.

This underscores my theory that by federalizing them the Bush Administration was really engaged in a stealth move to blacken the reputation of federal employees generally. Looks to be working. Of course, America West is doing the same for the airlines, so I suppose it could just be widespread incompetence.

I’VE GOTTEN SOME HOSTILE EMAIL about my links to Mickey Kaus’s posts on leftist political violence. So has Charles Austin. He’s posted this response.

UPDATE: And here’s another one.

BUSH NAMES FIRST HISPANIC TO SUPREME COURT, reports Howard Bashman.

DANIEL TAYLOR OF Dreaded Purple Master has been hospitalized after a heart attack. His wife says he’s expected to make a full recovery. Feel free to visit and leave your get-well wishes in the comments section.

He’s a trouper: “Daniel did ask for a room with an internet connection but the nurses just laughed.” Hey, a man’s gotta blog. If they can’t give me a room with a T-1, I just won’t get sick.

JUST NOTICED Enterprise Economy, a new economic news-and-analysis site run by Charles Oliver (formerly of Investor’s Business Daily).

FROM THE NOT-SERIOUS-ABOUT-THE-WAR DEPT.: Mickey Kaus reports that members of Congress have decided that homeland security isn’t important enough to justify actually firing incompetent employees!

AMERICA WEST UPDATE: Robin Roberts emails:

I think that the item you refer to re: America West tossing off a

passenger who joked about drunk pilots shows something I’ve noted

before. That airlines are treating their own customer service failures

as “air rage” incidents. How many businesses can deal with upset

customers by criminalizing them?

Absolutely. And this, of course, makes a mockery of security and antiterrorism.

TERRORISTS ON A TEST RUN? This story sounds alarmingly like the one told by James Woods. Only it’s from March.

UPDATE: Reader Frederick Larsen sends this note:

My sister is an America West employee (in Phoenix) who works at the boarding gates. She told me that last week boarding of a flight was disrupted by the presence of a group of 3 obviously Arabic men. Apparently they were not carrying or checking any luggage, were praying in the terminal (and a passenger alerted my sister’s boyfriend — also an America West gate employee — that they were praying about some pretty odd stuff, things that make you very anxious – I guess she understood Arabic). Of course, this had a bunch of the passengers very nervous. The pilots didn’t want to fly. Some supervisor apparently then interviewed the people and checked them out somehow and determined that they were not terrorists and cleared the flight for departure. Apparently about a dozen people chose not to take that flight.

This incident was scary enough for me to hear about, but to then hear that similar things are happening in other parts of the country REALLY makes me

worried.

Well, on the one hand you could say that this story proves the sytem worked. A reasonable suspicion led to a followup, which determined that everything was okay, and it was. I wonder, though: would a dozen passengers have been unwilling to fly with the woman who asked if the pilots were drunk? Probably not. But she wasn’t allowed to fly after further inquiry — she was bumped to another flight entirely.

Airline security is a joke. And it’s not a funny joke.

READER MARK WHITE writes that with Cheney getting flak over financial scandals, it’s time for the GOP to think seriously about moving Condi Rice onto the ticket.

Well, as the Ruffini-certified originator of the Condi 2004 boomlet, I’m all for that. Though I think perhaps the White House should be focusing on the war at the moment.

A PASSENGER WHO JOKINGLY ASKED IF HER AMERICA WEST PILOTS WERE SOBER was forcibly removed from the plane.

Best quote:

“Nowack said the crew decided to take the woman off the aircraft after determining that her remarks constituted a potential security problem.

“While this passenger may have been joking it is difficult to determine if someone is joking or serious. We take any comment regarding safety seriously,” she said.

Here’s a clue: when somebody says “I have a bomb,” it may be hard to tell if it’s a security threat. When somebody says “Are your pilots drunk?” it isn’t. Jeesus Christ, how stupid can the airlines be?

The worst part of becoming an airline employee, I guess, is when they stick a straw in your ear and suck out half your brains. And we trust these guys to operate potentially lethal equipment?

UPDATE: A reader writes to say that I’m unfair here. Pilots are under a lot of stress, and security is hard.

Yeah. But this wasn’t about security. This was about abusing security-related powers to take petty revenge on a passenger who said something the crew didn’t like. I don’t think I’m unfair to point this out. In fact, I think I was pretty gentle, considering.

BRING ON THE CYBORGS! And thank an engineer. My TechCentralStation column is up.

GERHARD SCHROEDER, reports Mickey Kaus is saying that the various U.S. accounting scandals prove that American-style shareholder capitalism is inferior to the European approach.

Anyone who believes this should read David Ignatius’s article on the Elf-Aquitaine scandal from last months’ Legal Affairs. That scandal — with its mafia-like behavior by government officials — suggests that European-style state capitalism has little to brag about in the scandal department. Indeed, the eagerness of American politicians to respond to things like WorldCom and Enron, compared with the coverups in the Elf-Aquitaine matter, suggests the opposite.

ENDLESS REHASHING OF BUSH V. GORE leaves me cold, but here’s an oped by Julie Hilden at Findlaw arguing that subsequent decisions by the Supreme Court suggest that the decision was a principled one.

I doubt this will change anyone’s mind, which is one reason why it’s hard for me to get excited about discussions of the case.