JONAH GOLDBERG WRITES THAT SADDAM IS NO HITLER, — and that’s what should worry us.

REALCLEARPOLITICS HAS A WEBLOG NOW. I thought I’d mentioned it before, but I was wrong.

TELFORD WORK is, well, not defending Jerry Falwell exactly, but complaining about people who criticized him being too quick to respect Muslim sensitivities. It’s the best thing I’ve read on the subject so far, and I feel that I should write a long post about this, but at the moment I just don’t have it in me. So read it yourself.

(Via Stuart Buck).

ERIC S. RAYMOND has penned a draft “Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto,” and is soliciting comments.

CLAYTON CRAMER says ballistic fingerprinting can’t work. And he’s got math. But how many people will understand it?

UPDATE: Freeside has more on this, here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s more on why this won’t work. I’m inclined to agree. Oh, and read this, too.

APPARENTLY, the promised image of the D.C. Sniper hasn’t appeared, and comments about his “middle eastern” look have vanished from official accounts. But a loyal InstaPundit reader has forwarded a copy of the image. Here it is. Looks believable to me. . . .

JEFF ROSEN WRITES: THANK GOODNESS FOR DICK ARMEY, stalwart protector of civil liberties.

Funny thing is, he’s right.

UPDATE: Jeralyn Merritt agrees, and says that pro-civil-liberties Democrats need to pay more attention to libertarians.

TIM BLAIR UNVEILS A NEW ANTITERROR STRATEGY:

HEARD anything from Italy’s Red Brigades lately? What about Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang? Where has Japan’s Red Army been hiding? Whatever happened to the Weather Underground?

All of these terrorist organisations have more or less vanished. According to the anti-war lobby, which holds that a violent reaction to terrorism only breeds more terrorism, they should be thriving. Andreas Baader’s suicide in Stammheim Prison in 1977 should have inspired an army of followers.

Instead, they’re gone. Killing and jailing terrorists wipes out terror. The only major European terrorist group from that era to survive in any significant way is the IRA, which tells us something: attacking terrorists doesn’t breed terror. Negotiating with them does.

Read the whole thing.

THIS gives the gun issue in the Maryland elections a new twist:

Hundreds of people with criminal records in Maryland may have been allowed to purchase guns illegally this year because the state temporarily stopped conducting background checks for the FBI, state and federal officials disclosed yesterday. . . .

Maryland’s state archivists notified the FBI in March that they would no longer perform criminal background checks of people who had applied to buy firearms because budget cuts had left the agency shorthanded, documents show.

“We just didn’t have the staff to do it,” said Edward C. Papenfuse, the head state archivist. “We had been doing it quietly for free but we got to the point where everyone’s budgets were being cut, and we couldn’t do it anymore.”

Papenfuse said his agency did not received any of the $6.7 million in federal funds allocated to Maryland since 1995 to modernize its criminal record-keeping and comply with federal gun control laws.

He said he wrote to Gov. Parris N. Glendening (D) in March to ask for money to pay a staff member to perform the background checks for the FBI, but was told that no funds were available until July 1.

How do you think this story would be being played if the Governor of Maryland were a Republican? “NRA-backed Governor skipped background checks?”

I wonder what the money was spent on?

TED BARLOW THINKS I WAS WRONG to link approvingly yesterday to a story about two PETA activists, one in a cow costume, whose anti-milk protest went sour and resulted in them being drenched in milk by a crowd of schoolchildren until they were rescued by police. I don’t know — Barlow makes it sound as if this were something out of Lord of the Flies, but to me it reads more like something out of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. The only injury these guys suffered was to their dignity, which was already suffering from the cow suit. Er, and their involvement with PETA.

And aren’t these the folks who think it’s okay to throw paint on women wearing fur? Didn’t Ingrid Newkirk express the wish that hoof-and-mouth disease would be brought to the United States because it would hurt the meat industry? (And maybe even encourage vegetarianism!) Then there’s this, from an article in HealthSpan dated February 1994 (no link, but it’s on Westlaw):

Another instance labeled as “domestic terrorism” by the FBI and documented in the Report to Congress occurred in 1989 at Texas Tech University’s Health Sciences Center in Lubbock. John Orem’s research on sleeping disorders, including Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), was using cats for experimentation. A group of activists from ALF entered the facility and damaged equipment, spray-painted slogans on walls, and stole several research cats.

Orem’s research was then subjected to a campaign of “intense propaganda and harassment,” including a statement from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) justifying what had taken place at the laboratory. Officials later estimated that “after the direct, collateral, and indirect consequences of the incident were considered, the total cost to the targeted institution was estimated as just over $1 million.”

The Justice/Agriculture Department report makes a very cogent statement concerning the indirect effects of violent acts and threats against research facilities: “The loss or diversion of resources inevitably has intangible consequences, especially for the biomedical community and other non-revenue generating industries. These costs often include: the loss, disruption, or delay of ongoing research; higher research costs; scheduled research projects postponed or cancelled; and research grants withheld. Another disruptive, albeit less resource dependent effect of animal rights extremism is the apprehension and fear that this activity can instill in an employee of any victimized animal enterprise.”

So I’m supposed to feel sorry for these guys because they got a (rather mild) taste of their own medicine instead of a debate on the philosophical deficiencies of the animal rights movement? When you choose to operate by a combination of street theater and intimidation, you can’t complain when others respond in the same way. This is like a well-deserved pie in the face.

UPDATE: Hey, you can buy cool t-shirts with statements from PETA people endorsing terrorism, too!

ANOTHER UPDATE: This is good, too. (Warning: big image).

A FIRSTHAND WEBLOG ACCOUNT from the Iraqi election. Diane E. has been in email communication, and says this blog is real.

A SAUDI LINK TO THE BALI BLAST? Say it ain’t so!

AS I READ THIS ARTICLE, Rumsfeld is reasserting civilian control over the military, and the brass doesn’t like it:

His disputes with parts of the top brass involve style, the conduct of military operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and sharply different views about how and whether to “transform” today’s armed forces. But what the fights boil down to is civilian control of a defense establishment that Rumsfeld is said to believe had become too independent and risk-averse during eight years under President Bill Clinton. . . .

Rumsfeld, say people who have dealt with him over the last two years, saw the Joint Staff as sometimes unresponsive to civilian leadership, even asserting its own policy positions at interagency meetings. He wasn’t alone in that feeling, recalled one officer at the Pentagon, who said that Joint Staff officers sometimes seemed to have the attitude that “the suits don’t need to know this, they stay in our lane, we stay in ours.”

Under Rumsfeld, the civilians are no longer cut out.

It would be foolish of Rumsfeld to ignore the advice of military professionals, notwithstanding his own considerable expertise. It would be equally foolish for military professionals to forget who they actually work for.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE has an interesting poll on gun control, though it is of course unscientific.

UPDATE: Oops. The link above either casts a vote, or says you’ve cast a vote, I’m not sure which. I just followed the results-link that a reader sent me and didn’t notice. Anyway, use this link instead.

BIN LADEN IS DEAD, says this report citing unnamed Israeli intelligence sources, but Al Qaeda has decided to go ahead.

GWEILO DIARIES HAS SOME ADVICE on how to help the Balinese.

MORE FROM ROBERT FISK, dealt with in the traditional fashion.

NYU CAN’T FIND A SINGLE PROFESSOR willing to defend its policy against military recruitment on campus. Unlike Stanley Kurtz, I see this not as a problem of bias, but as an admission.

UPDATE: Lane McFadden, who graduated from NYU Law School last year, has more information and background on this.

MORE REPORTS that the FBI is calling gun owners in the DC area. The behavior described here doesn’t sound as objectionable as the threats and bluster in the report I linked to earlier, though I wouldn’t surrender a gun to a law enforcement official who requested it for “testing” without a warrant. They often fail to return them, regardless of the circumstances, and getting anything done about it is very difficult.

At any rate, this all seems idiotic to me. If you contact someone and ask him a lot of “tough” questions or get his gun for “testing,” then there are two possibilities: He’s the sniper, or he’s not. If he is the sniper, won’t he bolt at the first contact? And he certainly won’t surrender the murder weapon. If he’s not the sniper, you’re wasting time and resources, and irritating people unnecessarily, thus impeding the investigation. Am I missing something here? Because this seems like bureaucratic ass-covering designed to let someone say they’ve interviewed X number of people, rather than anything that might actually lead to the killer.

UPDATE: Reader Jeff Peterson is skeptical, too, adding:

Ditto on the assessment of law enforcement tactics in the sniper investigation. The announcement that military surveillance planes are being employed seems of a piece with this; if the paramount concern were apprehending the sniper instead of PR, you would 1) request the military’s assistance without announcing this to the press; 2) nab the bad guy; and only then 3) thank the DOD, “whose technology proved crucial in apprehending the sniper,” etc.

Doesn’t the public announcement that the technology is in use raise the likelihood that the sniper will move his/their operation out of the DC vicinity or go dormant to evade capture and then strike again when public attention has turned elsewhere? A PR strategy increases the risk of further killing rather than decreasing it.

Yeah, if I were this guy I’d quit, take a couple of weeks off, and then start up somewhere else when people have started to relax. Of course, if I were this guy, I wouldn’t be out there shooting people to begin with, so. . . .

A LETTER OF SYMPATHY — and something rather more than sympathy — to Australia.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING COMMENT to my TechCentralStation column today — interesting enough to reproduce here, as it seems to address a question that has perplexed many:

The main symbiosis that I see is that the bloggers serve as a negative feedback loop for the bias, incompetence and dishonesty of an agenda driven mainstream news media. The monopoly of punditry by the mainstream media has been broken by first talk radio and second by the Internet and bloggers in particular.

Successful talk radio and Internet bloggers are conservative/libertarian because they represent the error signal in a negative feedback loop, correcting left wing bias.

The feedback loop idea makes sense to me.

GARETH PARKER POINTS OUT THAT THE BALINESE ARE VICTIMS TOO — and Kathy Kinsley has a suggestion on what to do about it, which I heartily endorse.

THIS COLUMN IN THE GUARDIAN says that among the casualties of the Bali bombing were self-blaming Australian intellectuals:

According to the prepared text, the attack was really America’s fault because of its bad behaviour elsewhere in the world. For insular Americans, the attack was a salutary illustration of what the Australian pundit Janet McCalman called their “lowly place in the affections of the poor and struggling”.

Australia, unashamedly America’s ally, was effectively an oppressor, too. If you took into account the behaviour of the Australian government when faced with the crisis engendered by the arrival, or non-arrival, of a Norwegian container ship full of Afghan refugees, Australia was even more guilty than America. Australia (perennially a racist country, as John Pilger’s historical researches have incontrovertibly proved) was a flagrant provocation to the wretched of the earth. Imperialist America was not only treating the helpless Middle East as its personal property, it had racist Australia for its lackey. No wonder al-Qaida was angry. . . .

Such was the consensus before the nightclub in Bali turned into a nightmare. . . . Not just the majority of the intellectuals, academics and schoolteachers, but most of the face-workers in the media, share the view that international terrorism is to be explained by the vices of the liberal democracies. Or, at any rate, they shared it until a few days ago. It will be interesting, in the shattering light of an explosive event, to see if that easy view continues now to be quite so widespread.

There’s much more. Well worth reading.

SPINSANITY IS ALL OVER REP. JIM MORAN (D-VA) for saying that opponents of ballistic fingerprinting just want to protect murderers.

This, sadly, is the sort of blood libel that one typically hears from advocates of gun control. I’m glad to see Spinsanity describing Jim Moran has having “taken the debate to a shameful low.”

UPDATE: The same kind of thing is often done to hunters, and Dave Kopel has an example that’s worth reading about.

ROCKING THE HOUSE OF PEACE: Tim Cavanagh writes:

The Rev. Jerry Falwell’s new career as an international insult comic creates an easy target for Islam’s self-appointed defenders; but the bromides of anti-discrimination are no substitute for actual discussion of some pretty important ideological questions. Not every Cold War leftist was a closet Stalinite, and I’d certainly like to believe that not every Imam is a secret jihadist. Unfortunately, the people who should be persuading me are too busy changing the subject.

Meanwhile The American Prospect is actually defending Jerry Falwell — though not against charges of idiocy.

UPDATE: Good, er, Lord — now it’s Dan Savage defending the American religious right:

I’d like to offer an uncharacteristic (for me) defense of America’s religious jackasses. While their tireless efforts to remove porn from hotel rooms, ban abortion, and pick on homos are annoying in the extreme, their actions seem positively benign when compared to, say, the actions of Saudi Arabia’s religious jackasses. At least our jackasses are only pressuring hotel chains to stop making porn available to horny businessmen. They’re not crashing airplanes into Marriott and Hilton hotel towers.

Hmm. I’m pretty sure that one of Kaus’s Rules of Punditry states that two examples make a trend, so let’s all recognize the new trend of lefties defending the American religious right!