BLOGGER.COM HAS BEEN HACKED! Take appropriate steps. Those of you who have moved away from Blogger should make sure you’re not using the old password for your new blog, just to be sure.

UPDATE: From Jason Shellen of Pyra:

Yes, it appears someone is having fun with one of our servers. Right now

we can tell you that:

– All your data is backed up, including email, user settings and what

not.

– Billing/credit card information is handled separately.

– We are working to restore from our most recent backup right now.

– The security problem that led to this attack will be fixed before we

bring Blogger back online.

Sounds like they’re on top of it.

SEN. PAUL WELLSTONE has died in a plane crash along with his wife, daughter, and some unnamed campaign workers.

UPDATE: It feels unseemly to be talking about this so soon, but another blogger who’s unable to post because of the Blogger hacking incident sends this link to what he says is the relevant Minnesota statute. I plan to engage in no further discussion of the Minnesota election today.

CORRECTION? Now a couple of people say this is the relevant statute. And now Jason Rylander emails with this one, too.

If I’ve missed anything I’ll update it above, but — even though I realize that it’s inevitable people will be talking about this with the election so close — I really don’t want to write any more about this right now. I’ve always rather liked Wellstone despite disagreeing with him on some issues, and I find his death very sad. The Torch affair was farce: this is tragedy.

Here’s an obituary by a former student.

BELLESILES NON-UPDATE: Many people were expecting a decision yesterday. Now there’s some speculation that Emory will release its decision this afternoon, so as to bury the news over the weekend. Stay tuned.

YOU KNEW THIS WAS COMING: The first of no doubt many lame “the Army made him do it” pieces.

SKBUBBA emails:

Where did a basically down and out and practically homeless guy get the money to purchase a somewhat expensive rifle and sniper accessories? And a car? Is this guy a stooge for somebody, or a beta test? Your Islamoterrorist theory is starting to sound more and more likely, even if it is just a rogue operation.

I also wondered about the poor illegal immigrant saps that pulled up to that phone booth in a white van. Did Muhammad/Williams set them up? You know how these guys hang around certain parts of town looking for work. I

can see Muhammad/Williams telling them “yeah, hey, I’ve got some work for you. Be at this phone booth at 10:00 or whatever and I’ll give you details and

directions.”

Interesting questions. I hope that some of the journalists working on this story are following up on them.

UPDATE: Rod Dreher points out that someone was asking these questions — and trying to get the FBI interested — before the shootings started. Here’s the story Dreher refers to. Excerpt:

Once, Muhammad told Grant that he had to travel a long distance, possibly to Jamaica or the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean, to sign some papers on a land sale, Grant said. Grant said he wondered why Muhammad would fly to do that when the job could be handled by mail.

In the post 9-11 climate, Archer felt it was worth a call to the FBI.

“I felt like he was part of an organization. I felt like he had some connection with terrorists. … I said he’s got connections somewhere with somebody who’s got money,” Archer remembered telling the FBI.

This, mind you, while Muhammad was living in a homeless mission. Sounds suspicious to me.

DIANE E. finds profiling alive and well at the Times — along with some after-the-fact airbrushing. She notes: “This may seem a lot of trouble to go for one silly quote. The point is that even after two black men were identified as suspects the NY Times clung to the model of the snipers as motivated by fantasies associated with the extreme right.”

Yeah, but whose fantasies, exactly?

DAVID FRUM has very handsomely arranged to have his Telegraph piece from the other day revised to credit John Hawkins. (It had earlier credited an anonymous “internet essayist,” because Frum didn’t know where the piece, forwarded him in an email, had come from). Here, by the way, is a link to the essay by Hawkins, entitled “Confessions of an Isolationist Wannabe.”

FISKING ROBERT RENO: Suman Palit is unimpressed with Reno’s latest column, which suggests that “the constitutional right to ‘bear’ arms must be abridged in new and more imaginative ways.”

So Reno is openly calling for “imaginative ways” to “abridge” the Bill of Rights? And these guys think that Ashcroft is a threat to civil liberties? (Palit: “I can think of imaginative ways to abridge every single Amendment on the grounds that it hurts someone, somewhere.. a bag of peanuts to the first person who can tell this man why we don’t. “)

Palit calls Reno’s arguments “childlike,” but frankly that credits Reno with a degree of innocence that is not evidenced by his statements.

THE REV. BRIAN CHAPIN has some tart comments on the way the media covered the sniper affair. They’re worth reading in light of the media self-congratulation underway today. And the cartoons are terrific!

A DEFENSE OF AMERICA — AND CONDEMNATION OF “AMERICA-HATING LIBERALS” in a rather surprising venue. Excerpt:

When the news of 9/11 broke on the West Bank, those freedom-loving Palestinians were dancing in the street. America watched all of that – and didn’t push the button. We should thank the stars that America is the most powerful nation in the world. I still find it incredible that 9/11 did not provoke all-out war. Not a “war on terrorism”. A real war.

The fundamentalist dudes are talking about “opening the gates of hell”, if America attacks Iraq. Well, America could have opened the gates of hell like you wouldn’t believe.

The US is the most militarily powerful nation that ever strode the face of the earth.

The campaign in Afghanistan may have been less than perfect and the planned war on Iraq may be misconceived.

But don’t blame America for not bringing peace and light to these wretched countries. How many democracies are there in the Middle East, or in the Muslim world? You can count them on the fingers of one hand – assuming you haven’t had any chopped off for minor shoplifting.

Hmm. Maybe there’s hope for The Mirror after all. Or maybe the fact that John Pilger’s anti-American screeds haven’t staunched its hemorrhaging circulation is finally convincing people that the market for such blather is limited.

THE GWEILO DIARIES has a firsthand account of John Ashcroft’s address in Hong Kong. It’s not a very positive one.

HEY! LOOK AT THIS! A Nobel Peace Prize winner who actually helped people! Must’ve been an oversight.

HISTORICAL IRONY: Geitner Simmons writes about French intellectuals’ rethinking of the Napoleon myth.

ARTS AND LETTERS DAILY IS BACK!

CLAYTON CRAMER has crunched some numbers on ballistic registration. His conclusion is that in the best-case scenario, not many additional murder cases could be solved — only 78 “rifle murders” a year, for example, and that’s the kind of case that’s the alleged justification for registration, given the sniper case. Which was solved via other means anyway, of course.

WHOOPEE CUSHIONS AS MARITAL AIDS: More than I want to know about Charles Murtaugh’s home life, in an otherwise very interesting post.

JOHN CARNEY NOTES that John Muhammad was registering his killing machine on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Hmm, he changed his name right after the attacks, too. But remember, he’s just a lone nut. No connection to Islamic terror here.

Andrew Sullivan notes:

But we do know the following: he was a convert to Islam, he changed his name recently, he harbored “strong anti-American feelings and had publicly praised the terrorist attacks of September 11,” he actively supported the Nation of Islam, and the New Jersey plates for the car were bought on the first anniversary of September 11, immediately after which a bomb scare emptied the DMV building. Call me crazy, but isn’t that a striking series of coincidences? To read the papers this morning is like looking at several massive dots with no-one daring to connect them.

Indeed. Yeah, sure, the guy’s got a history of violence and lunacy, too — but so do most terrorists. They’re not very admirable people. As Sullivan concludes:

So we have a Muslim convert, sympathetic to the murderers of 9/11, terrorizing the nation’s capital, and coming close to shutting its daily life down. I don’t see that it matters whether he was formally a member of al Qaeda or some other group. In fact, it’s more disturbing if he is not.

Maybe that’s why a lot of people don’t want to think about it. Sullivan raises some other questions worth thinking about, too.

MICHAEL MOYNIHAN notes an effort to criticize Bush that seems unable to avoid lapsing into Stalinism.

WHO CARES WHAT THE LAW SAYS? A priceless quote in the New York Times:

Mr. Faraday was careful to say its copies of the M-16 were not assault weapons, since they do not have collapsible stocks, flash suppressers or a mounting to install a bayonet, some features that were ruled out by the 1994 ban. The magazine of the XM-15 also holds only 10 rounds, the permissible limit set by the 1994 ban.

In addition, the rifle is only a semiautomatic, requiring a trigger pull for each shot, not fully automatic as a military rifle, which allows multiple rounds to be fired with a single pull of the trigger.

But Kristen Rand, the legislative director for the Violence Policy Center in Washington, a gun control group, said that the XM-15 seized in Mr. Muhammad’s car still had features that mimic an assault weapon.

“It complies with the letter of the law, but it is still an assault rifle,” Ms. Rand said.

Hmm. It was the gun “fanatics” who said that the assault weapon ban was purely cosmetic. But now the VPC seems to agree.

JEN TALIAFERRO HAS LOTS OF UPDATES on the Moscow hostage situation. This isn’t getting the attention it deserves from the U.S. media.

RAND SIMBERG IS CYNICAL ABOUT THE MEDIA:

Hmmmm…an African-American fellow by the name of Muhammed. Nope, no Muslims here, folks, nothing to see, move along.

The disappointment among the press corps that it wasn’t an evil right-wing white militia type is almost palpable. Now they don’t get to talk about the culture of hate, and blame Rush Limbaugh, and talk radio, and all of us evil right-wing bloggers. In particular they don’t get to do it two weeks before a mid-term election, in which they can paint Republicans as bigoted enablers of right-wing violence.

He has some suggestions regarding bigoted enablers of violence that they should be covering instead.

A PRIESTLY TIP? Here’s an interesting angle on how the sniper story was cracked.

DAVID HARSANYI WANTS TO KNOW what the hell is wrong with Jimmy Breslin.

WHY I LOVE MY JOB: A paper that a student wrote in my Space Law seminar last year on the environmental ethics of terraforming Mars has now become a nice little article in the Environmental Law Reporter.

MORE ON BALLISTIC FINGERPRINTING, from Alphecca.