TERRORIST PLOT FOILED IN CALIFORNIA: No, not those terrorists. Some other terrorists. Equally dumb though.

EVERYBODY IS HAPPY WITH THE NEW REPUBLIC’S NEW BLOG: But that hasn’t saved them from the exacting scrutiny of The Scrutineer.

THE ARAB NEWS seeems to have changed its tune recently:

In the case of Iraq, though, any new government would be an improvement over the repressive and thuggish regime of Saddam Hussein.

As some Muslim commentators have been eager to point out, most notably the Iranian-born Amir Taheri writing this past week in both the Jerusalem Post and National Review, Saddam does not have widespread support either with Arab regimes or the Arab street. Having killed many Islamists and Nasserites, Saddam is not liked by Al-Qaeda supporters or the Arab left. Taheri predicts that the Arab street will not erupt into fury if Saddam is overthrown, which is probably true. The irony is that although most of the Muslim world will probably welcome regime change in Iraq, it will also probably resent the fact that it was the Americans who did it.

Yeah, kind of like, well, everybody else.

UPDATE: Gary Farber says he has comments on this, but at the moment Blogspot isn’t working, so I don’t know what they say. I’m about ready to join with Rachel Lucas in the “Blogspot is the devil” camp. I’m constantly getting email complaining that my links to blogspot blogs don’t work. They work when I put ’em up, but God knows whether blogspot will be up later, or whether it’ll send you somewhere besides the item the link was originally pointing at, or whatever.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader John Tuttle writes that Dianne Feinstein apparently isn’t reading the Arab News:

I just watched Sen Dianne Feinstein live on Fox News try to scare Americans that liberating Iraq (my term) unilaterally, pre-emptively attacking Iraq (her view) will unite the Arab world against us. Sen DiFi is also putting the interests of the UN ahead of the interests of the US and the American People. The UN somehow has the moral authority to attack Iraq, but the government that she is part of, doesn’t have that moral authority. Go figure.

I actually thought that Feinstein got a bit of a bum rap for her remark about being “embarrassed” to wear an American flag pin, since the remark was less offensive in context than some people made it sound. But one reason why most people didn’t give her the benefit of the doubt on that remark was the broader context provided by other things she says.

SAY WHAT YOU WANT, I think that it’s caused by SUVs.

TURNABOUT IS FAIR PLAY: Send this to someone in Nigeria.

SULTRY BLOG SIREN Heather Havrilesky is interviewed in L.A. Weekly, and she lets it all hang out. Er, figuratively. The most interesting factual angle is the comparatively small readership figure cited for Suck.

A COMING CRACKDOWN IN HONG KONG? Gweilo Diaries says it’s here now. Weirdly, there are some signs of a letup in Tibet.

TODD ZYWICKI SAYS that if you want to riot for anarchy, at least get the anarchy part right.

JUAN GATO invokes the Port Huron statement in support of making November’s elections a referendum on the war.

MASS POST DAY on BlogCritics has netted over 100 posts so far. Wow.

WANT A BLOG THAT’S NOT ABOUT POLITICS AND WAR? This should fill the bill. I still hear from quite a few of my ex-girlfriends from time to time. I’m happy to say that none of them are anything like this one. In fact, they’re all still very nice people.

THIS AFRICA NEWS PAGE looks pretty interesting, though it’s obviously got its own slant.

CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES, a best-of-weblog postings compilation, is up.

PATRIOT ACT UPDATE: A couple of weeks ago I linked to this article in the New York Times on a paper by George Washington University professor Orin Kerr who argues that the Patriot Act does much less to diminish privacy than is generally believed.

Now here’s a link to the piece. The link takes you to an abstract page, from which you can download the whole article. If you’re interested in the Patriot Act, it’s a must-read.

UPDATE: Okay, it’s 11:20pm and the server’s now really slow. Try, like, staggering your downloads — it’ll still be there tomorrow. Though it could just be a problem at their end.

“WE DIDN’T START THIS, BUT YOU CAN BET WE’LL FINISH IT!” That’s the tagline on a G.I. Joe commercial that just aired on the Cartoon Network. He’s gotten more bellicose since the summer of 2001. Of course, I noted that trend a while back.

THIS LENGTHY POINT-BY-POINT REBUTTAL TO AL GORE’S SPEECH was on my list to link earlier, but I forgot which blog I’d seen it on. (Yeah, I know, embarrassing.) Then I saw the link on Bill Quick’s blog and remembered. It’s Sensing’s lengthy response, with links and names, to Gore’s statement that “The vast majority of those who sponsored, planned and implemented the cold blooded murder of more than 3,000 Americans are still at large,” that I find particularly interesting. An awful lot of these folks are dead or behind bars.

I wonder why the Bush Administration hasn’t made this point so clearly. Maybe they’re afraid to make the war look too successful?

SLAVES TO THE RIGHT? Kaimipono Wenger is unpersuaded by claims from The Alliance for Justice that 7 of the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal are controlled by the “extreme right.”

GREGG EASTERBROOK has the Florida recount business about right in my opinion. (Scroll past football-related stuff). The U.S. Supreme Court should have stayed out. But The Florida court’s dreadful behavior, and the red flag it constituted, don’t get enough attention.

GOOD GRIEF! Now I discover that she can cook, too! The recipe sounds good; I may try it myself.

FRENCH TROOPS RESCUE AMERICANS! (No, really!) It’s a bit of much-needed good publicity for the French, and well-deserved.

RADLEY BALKO WRITES ON FOXNEWS that the DEA’s new campaign to link terrorism and drug use is lame and dishonest.

Yes, it is. It also undermines respect for Homeland Security and the war on terrorism in general. If Daschle wanted to blast someone for making political use of the war, he should have targeted this. But that would mean attacking a bureaucracy full of civil servants who vote Democratic. . . .

THE WIT AND WISDOM OF HOMER SIMPSON. (Via Samizdata).

THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR‘S WARBLOG looks at Islam’s bloody borders. An interesting global perspective.

CENTRAL PARK JOGGER UPDATE: Talkleft is reporting that ABC is going to do a story on false confessions relating to the case.

Well, to paraphrase Mark Knopfler: “Two men say they’re Jesus. One of them must be wrong.” The problem with the jogger case is that we have lots of confessions. They can’t all be true. But which to believe?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS is leaving The Nation. Josh Marshall has the scoop.