HOMELAND SECURITY: Van Harp, who’s in charge of the FBI’s anthrax investigation, was recommended for discipline for misconduct relating to the Ruby Ridge incident:

The department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, in a confidential report, concluded in 1999 that Harp “committed misconduct” by helping make an incomplete report that protected “some subjects of the investigation,” according to Saturday’s Washington Post.

In January 2001, an assistant attorney general overruled an Office of Professional Responsibility recommendation that Harp – by then the agent in charge of the Cleveland office – be censured or suspended. His clean record intact, Harp in July 2001 was transferred to Washington, where as the agent in charge of the Washington field office he is overseeing the FBI’s anthrax investigation.

Yeah, this boosts my confidence. Kinda the way this does.

UPDATE: This looks pretty lame, too.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Hesiod Theogeny emails:

Given all the revelations about how the FBI royally screwed up prior to 9/11, including its ignoring of Congressional and Justice Department mandates to

upgrade its computer systems, I think it’s time to create an “indict Louis Freeh” bumper sticker campaign.

Or, at the very least, it’s time to drag his pathetic carcass in front of a Congressional investigating committee for a high-profile barbecue.

How this guy gets away with so little criticism is beyond me.

Well, he may not have been good at his job, but he was very good at the politics of his job.

ALL DAY LONG, I’ve been wondering what to say about this Maureen Dowd column. But I think Josh Chafetz speaks for me, too.

THIS 9/11 DOCUMENTARY ON DVD won’t be released for two more weeks, but it’s already number 22 on Amazon. And read the reviews.

People want the unvarnished truth, not a soft-focus version. I wonder if the networks’ anniversary coverage will reflect this.

MATT WELCH ASKS YOU TO HELP victims of the Czech floods. He has a link.

I’M A BIG FAN OF BILL QUICK, but I’m not sure that DailyPundit Premium is going to fly. But hey, I could be wrong, and I wish him and the other Premium Bloggers the best of luck.

InstaPundit remains free (except for the tipjar), and is likely to stay that way.

THE SEGWAY MUST BE HORRIBLY DANGEROUS! How do we know? Because there are no data on accidents!

Horace Hinshaw, spokesman for the Postal Service in San Francisco, said there have been no problems with the Segways being tested in the city. The only reported accident nationally appears to have been in Atlanta — where an employee of one of the several agencies there that use the scooters fell off.

That didn’t stop the San Francisco protesters from carrying signs saying: “Stop the Segway slaughter,” and “Segway: Zero Emissions, Senior Killer.” . . .

The group’s executive director, Bob Livingston, tried to get on the machine and ended up plowing into furniture. Price said the board voted unanimously to oppose any and all use of the scooter where the elderly might encounter one.

“It really did scare a lot of our people,” Price said. “If that machine comes down the sidewalk behind you, you never know what it’s going to do. It could be disastrous.”

This just defies parody.

(Via Faisal.Com.)

BLOGGING CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE TARA SUE GRUBB is now collecting donations via PayPal. Give early and often.

WHO IS TAPPED KIDDING? It thinks that Ann Coulter’s publisher should make major changes because of errors that bloggers have found in her book.

But last I heard, Knopf was still defending Michael Bellesiles’ utterly discredited book Arming America. The errors people are pointing out in Coulter’s book are chickenfeed compared to the pattern of ineptitude and/or fraud identified in Bellesiles’ book. Yet neither Knopf nor major book review publications like the New York Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books have acknowledged that their reviews of Bellesiles’ book giving the erroneous impression that it is a useful scholarly work that can be trusted are — to put it mildly — wrong, wrong, wrong.

Am I suggesting there’s a double standard, when a “pop” book comes in for more general criticism than an allegedly scholarly book — and that it’s no coincidence that the criticized book is right-wing while the allegedly scholarly book is PC? Yes, I am. Thanks for asking.

TUNEAGE: I’ve been meaning to pick up Apollo 440’s Electro Glide in Blue for quite a while, and I finally did today. So far, it rocks.

ENVIRONMENTALISTS AGAINST CLEAN POWER: Here’s a story to add to the Johannesburg coverage. There’s just no satisfying some people.

UPDATE: Of course, maybe there’s a reason for the strangely amnesiac quality of a lot of reporting on these issues. . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Wow, here’s more Green kvetching:

The newest manifestation of Nimby, or not in my backyard, requires a different acronym: not in my viewshed. Wind-farm opponents contend that, like a watershed, a viewshed, or public view, is the common property of those who share it, and must not be degraded unilaterally by any one property owner.

So when wind power is held out as an environmentally friendly alternative to, say, nuclear power, just remember that people will bitch about it, too, if it should ever happen to actually materialize.

And all those solar collectors? Ugly. Must be banned.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Tony Hooker says that he’s got the explanation.

SKIRMISHES AND BORDER INCURSIONS between Chad and the Central African Republic. Two places that have enough problems already.

UPDATE: A reader asks:

So where’s the outrage over the unilateralist action and failure to build a

coalition and make the case to the international community, eh?

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER and Brendan Nyhan both have interesting thoughts on Iraq. This item by Eugene Volokh is worth reading, too, as it capsulizes part of the debate very nicely. Eric Alterman, meanwhile, serves up a bunch of links on the anti-war side.

THE NEW CALIFORNIA STATE QUARTER is out. The L.A. Examiner has the scoop.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON REPORTS that Missouri’s Jean Carnahan is in electoral trouble, and is trying to ingratiate herself to gunowners.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: Check out this photo from Neal Boortz’s page and this photo from Lucianne.Com.

Given the availability of cheap digital cameras and the nature of the airport screening system, we’ll probably be seeing a lot of pictures like this. Watch for the TSA to forbid such picture-taking on “security” grounds. That would be job security grounds, I believe.

LINDA SEEBACH WRITES that a lot of people are suddenly embracing academic freedom who never bothered to do so when it was conservative views under attack. I agree with her position: “Well, the more recruits for liberty the better, no matter how late they decide to join the party.” But read the whole column to see just how late.

JEFF COOPER discusses what happens when you mention your weblog in a wired classroom. Pretty amusing.

At UT we have what is allegedly the world’s largest wireless network, covering the whole campus and some nearby non-campus areas. (It’s probably going to be extended to the Convention Center area, too.) The bandwidth consumption is huge and getting steadily huger. I’m sure it’s all course-related, though.

AIMEE DEEP IS CONTEMPLATING LAW SCHOOL, because of the stellar example of Sarah Deutsch of Verizon, who spoke out against the DMCA, Rep. Berman’s Hollywood Home Hacking Bill, and other Big Media legal initiatives.

THANKS TO EVERYONE who sent birthday wishes yesterday, including Ted Barlow, whose bouncing midget British weatherman was, er, unique, and the Rev. Tony Pierce, who complimented my looks — though I can’t help remembering that the motto of his blog is “nothing in here is true.”

PERSONALLY, I THINK THIS GUY has a good chance of being elected.

RICHARD POSNER REVIEWS Alan Dershowitz’s new book on terrorism in The New Republic. Although Posner is appropriately critical of Dershowitz’s general tendency toward showboating (the opening paragraph is delightful on this subject), he’s surprisingly positive of the book, concluding:

Dershowitz’s book will anger unreconstructed civil libertarians, the government-phobes on the extreme right, and Arafat’s European apologists. That is a considerable merit; but more important is that he has shown that international terrorism does not present an insoluble contradiction between the Constitution and American security.

I agree that there’s no “insoluble contradiction” there and I think it’s unfortunate that both advocates of law enforcement power and civil libertarians often act as if there is an inevitable tradeoff between freedom and security. But many things that enhance security (like killing Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, or in any other country where they may be found) pose no risk to freedom. And many things that intrude on freedom (like airport tweezer-confiscation policies) do nothing to enhance security. We forget this at our peril.

STILL MORE ON SUSTAINABILITY: My TechCentralStation column for this week says that Johannesburg is a test for the environmental movement: will it surrender to Luddism and redistributionist blather, or actually propose things that will make things better?

UPDATE: Oops. Looks like they’re failing already.

SUSTAINABILITY UPDATE: James Lileks has a Screed responding to the latest wealth-is-bad blather from George Monbiot. It’s too good to excerpt, but here’s Lileks’ response to Monbiot’s claim that the world’s poor are happier than rich Westerners:

Is it just me, or does this smack of the old Happy-Darky myth they used to peddle in the South? Look at them down there stampin’ their feet in the mud as they dance – why, they’re happier than most of the belles you see at a cotillion.

Read the whole thing. Some enterprising free-marketeer in Johannesburg ought to print it out, copy it, and leave copies on the room-service trays of the press.

Personally, I don’t know anyone — and I mean anyone — as fiercely determined to become rich as the Nigerians in my extended family. That’s because they understand what it means not to be rich in a way that overpaid Western hand-wringers never will.

Oh, okay, one more excerpt — but you still have to read the whole thing, or you’ll hate yourself later:

The percentage of Mr. Monbiot’s salary that he spends on Thai restaurants, and the percentage that he sends to Thailand, is not disclosed.

There’s a lot of that going around this week.

MICKEY KAUS FACT-CHECKS PAUL KRUGMAN, and picks up the ball on the RNC-fraud story initially reported by N.Z. Bear.

ARE HUMANS A PLAGUE ON THE EARTH? John Gray says yes. (Not the Mars and Venus John Gray, but the increasingly-oxymoronic Professor of European Thought John Gray). Helene Guldberg says that John Gray is an idiot.