SFSU UPDATE: In case you missed my earlier, quasi-illicit reference, my FoxNews column for today is about the SFSU riot, the University’s response, and what it means for free speech on campuses nationwide.

ASPARAGIRL has identified a new weapon in the war against Islamofascism.

MATT WELCH has a post about people afraid to speak their mind. He asks readers if they’ve had that problem. I should have that problem — I mean, I’m in the academic world and all, where most people don’t think like me. But I don’t.

Part of it is I grew up an academic brat, and I’ve heard profs spouting the bullshit-of-the-moment all my life, which provides a degree of immunity from groupthink. The guys who were free-love in 1970 were married and coaching soccer in the 1980s, while usually supporting dumb sex-harassment rules aimed at undergraduates, now that their circumstances had changed. I also find that if you act embarrassed about your opinions the sharks circle. If you don’t, they find easier prey.

One of the few crusty old guys left at Yale once got visited by some students who complained about something un-PC that he had said or done. He reflected for a moment and said “Well, that might bother me — if I cared what students thought!” They never bothered him again, but took off after the guilty liberals from then on.

KEN LAYNE posts a lengthy response to Josh Marshall’s comment on the correlation between being Jewish and supporting Israel:

I’m not Jewish — yet I couldn’t be more disgusted by the tidal wave of anti-Jew/anti-Israel crap this year.

In fact, I’m a white-trash Kentucky/Louisiana kid who never even knew what a Jew was outside of Moses in the “Ten Commandments” until I moved to California as a youngster. Hell, Catholics were weird enough for me, back in New Orleans. (Yeah, I knew some priests, but they were just nice old drunks.)

I was going to excerpt more, but Layne’s piece is too good to try to summarize. Just go read it.

PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH has a response to Michaelangelo Signorile’s anti-Fortuyn diatribe.

THE FIRST BLOG STAR WARS REVIEW? Well, this one is the first that I’ve seen, anyway. Summary: He likes it.

KEVIN JAMES analyzes the Dutch election results.

HMM. I went to this site and I noticed it’s got the same template as this site, which somehow struck me as very weird. It’s especially weird when you toggle between them and forget for a second which one you’re reading.

CARTER, IN WISCONSIN, SEES NO EVIDENCE OF CHEESE: Andy Borowitz skewers our peripatetic former Chief Executive:

Fresh from his successful fact-finding trip to Cuba, former President Jimmy Carter visited Wisconsin today and said that he found “no evidence of cheese” anywhere in the state.

“I am confident that there is no cheese anywhere in Wisconsin,” Mr. Carter said after completing his tour of the state’s dairy farms, cheese-making facilities and cheese storage warehouses. . . . In addition, Mr. Carter said, the secret service had recently changed his code name to “Mr. Magoo.”

While Mr. Carter said that he was looking forward to briefing President Bush about his visits to Cuba and Wisconsin, White House sources said the President had no intention of meeting with Mr. Carter, and would instead try to trick the former President by having him talk to a hand puppet operated by senior advisor Karl Rove.

Ouch. And this is from a guy who’s on NPR!

POSTWATCH IS A NEW BLOG devoted to keeping an eye on, what else, The Washington Post.

TAPPED is too easy on Ashcroft — or at least on the FBI, an organization that is usually — for better and worse — only under nominal control from the Department of Justice. But this language is unfairly nice to both:

It’s easy to play Monday morning quarterback on this sort of thing. Certainly it would have been hard, before 9/11, to take seriously the idea of terrorists flying a plane into the World Trade Center.

This is the part that makes me mad, and I heard quite a few FBI and antiterrorist folks say this. But it shouldn’t have been hard at all to imagine such a thing. First, I’ve flown into New York many times, and never looked down without noticing how close those buildings were and how easily a plane could crash into them. (And who hasn’t played Flight Simulator and done that?)

Second, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two Columbine killers, had planned to hijack a jetliner and crash it into Manhattan — I don’t know if they mentioned the WTC or not, but that hardly matters. Surely the FBI’s heard of them? Mightn’t that have made the idea just a trifle more imaginable?

Third, the FBI knew there were suspicious people in flight school, and was told by Moussaoui’s flight instructor, as part of his extensive lobbying efforts (!) to get the FBI interested in the case, that a loaded airliner was a fearsome weapon. And they had similar, if not quite as explicit, warnings from people at the Phoenix flight school.

Fourth, crashing a plane into a building (the Capitol) is in a friggin’ Tom Clancy novel for chrissakes!

Now, the dangers of Monday-morning quarterbacking are real. It might be that the FBI couldn’t have stopped these guys no matter what. But if they really couldn’t imagine anyone doing anything like crashing a plane into the World Trade Center, then we should fire them and hire someone a little more, um, imaginative.

And for not doing that, Ashcroft is definitely to blame.

UPDATE: Reader Kirk Parker adds: “Don’t forget this other should-have-made-it-conceivable: the terrorist ring in the Phillipines that were planning to hijack a bunch of airliners and crash them. When was that exposed? 1995 or 1996, I think?” Oh, yeah. I had forgotten that one. It’s hard to keep track of all the reasons they should have imagined this.

ROBERT REICH is getting $80,000 an hour to speak? How do I get that gig?

And he was only Secretary of Labor. Think how much he’d be getting if he’d gotten Treasury!

I’M PROBABLY NOT SUPPOSED TO TELL YOU THIS UNTIL TOMORROW, but my FoxNews column is up. It’s about the SFSU riot.

They changed my title, though. Mine was “Broken Windows” on Campus, which I thought was better. But then, I’m a law professor, not a Professional Headline Writer.

DAVID DUKE UPDATE: Natalie Solent email:

Your “feel the love” link now gives a test message, and the name David Duke is nowhere to be found in their archives.

Boris Kupershmidt can’t find it either, and speculates that Arab News have finally got wind that they are making themselves a laughing stock.

Dang. We’ll have to send them some more useless idiots from the West. We’ve already done Chomsky, so . . . is Chris Patten available? There’s always the Aryan Nations. Though the Saudis might think that means Iran.

UPDATE: Zach Barbera points out that it’s still on Duke’s website.

ZACHARY BARBERA links to an analysis of suicide bombings by Jane’s that says there are 10 groups using the technique. He also has (scroll down) a quote from a Moroccan Muslim who said Pim Fortuyn was right about immigration.

FINGERPRINT READERS: As effective as I would have thought! Which is to say, not effective at all. Here’s the original CounterPane link.

UPDATE: Reader James R. Rummel writes:

I worked for some years as a fingerprint technician for the police in Columbus, Ohio before finding a new career in mainframes. The hot thing back when I was in law enforcement was a brand new AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System). This wasn’t as glamorous as it sounds. It was a digital imaging system that would take pictures of fingerprints. The operator would then view the picture on a screen and manually place markers to indicate details (such as a bifurcation or ending ridge lines).

When the computer would look for a match, it would ignore the digital picture completely and just compare patterns of markers that it had in it’s data base. It would alert the operator to the best matches it had, and then it would be up to the human to dig up the cards from out of filing cabinets and compare the prints using a magnifying glass. Just like it’s been done for 100 years.

This isn’t to say that AFIS machines aren’t useful. They can search a database of millions of individual fingers and indicate possible matches in a few minutes. This can vastly speed up the matching of latent prints (prints found at a crime scene). They streamline the processing of suspects, which means that fewer wanted criminals will slip through the cracks. All of this is a good thing. But it’s been my experience that the machines can’t do it all by themselves. People trained in fingerprint ID will still be necessary, particularly if only one finger instead of all ten are used as a basis of comparison.

When I first heard that they were going to install AFIS machines in airports to check for terrorists I thought that it was amazing how far the technology had matured in just a few years. Now I realize that all of the hype is just enthusiasm and PR designed to sell the systems. Even if they can’t do what they claim.

That, unfortunately, sums up most of the “homeland security” initiatives, as far as I can tell. I hope that things are better than they look.

HERE’S A STORY on the anti-semitic riot at SFSU from the Jerusalem Post.

IT’S SORT OF LIKE A Reader’s Digest for the Web.

STEVEN DEN BESTE has discovered another front in the war on Islamofascism. And we’re doing quite well, thank you. Let’s all raise our, er, glasses to a patriotic, yet underappreciated, American industry.

MEMO TO JOSH MARSHALL: I was one until some time in 1993.

PECUNIA NON OLET: Richard Bennett writes about money and blogging. I don’t mind money — if I did I wouldn’t have the tip jar on the left. I don’t want a boss. Give me money without a boss and I’m happy. Come to think of it, that pretty much describes being a professor.

NOW, WHO EXACTLY is the Saudi boycott of American business hurting?

MICHELLE COTTLE is pro-choice on smallpox vaccination.

SFSU UPDATE: Mac Frazier has this roundup of coverage. The blogosphere has accounted for most of it. It will be the topic of my FoxNews column tomorrow — maybe that’ll produce a bit more attention.

UPDATE UPDATE: SFSU may not have done anything — other than issue a letter — about violent action by antisemitic Palestinians, but Syracuse University is looking at suspending a fraternity, and expelling one of its members, because the member appeared in public in blackface.

That’s the current state of priorities in higher education.

ATRIOS is startled to learn that I’m not a mouth-breathing troglodyte. Uh, thanks! Maybe next he/she will figure out that I’m not a “right-winger.” Gena Lewis understands why.