CHARLES AUSTIN has come out of retirement to “scourge” Richard Cohen’s latest.

A SONNETBLOG?

SO MUCH FOR THE ANGRY WHITE MALE THEORY. Seth Gitell writes in the Boston Phoenix that maybe this means it’s time to rethink some other investigations.

QUICK-CHANGE OPPORTUNISM AT THE VIOLENCE POLICY CENTER: Reader Andrew Wharton writes:

Note that Violence Policy Center’s website has a new cover for their “Sniper” report. It no longer is using an “evil bolt-action” and has replaced the graphic with a stylized man holding an obvious AR-15. The tip-off is that the PDF file referenced has been renamed to “snipcov2.pdf” (Sniper, Cover two. Get it?). The other smoking gun is that the PDF has a date stamp of “10/24/02”. Pretty recent for a report that was supposedly published in 1999.

Heh. All I can say is: I told you so: “Prediction: Artificial hysteria over the ‘sniper culture’ will soon be redirected into hysteria over ‘assault weapons’ once a picture of the gun becomes widely available.”

UPDATE: Hmm. I followed the link and the properties are as described, dated 10/24/02, but I went to the Internet Wayback Machine and the cover shown there looks the same.

NIKITA DEMOSTHENES REPORTS that the gun issue is being used against Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, based on Maryland’s failure to enforce existing gun laws:

Rep. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. ripped his gubernatorial rival yesterday for Maryland’s failure to check the criminal backgrounds of hundreds of people applying to buy guns, taking the offensive on an issue that has dogged his campaign for weeks.

Ehrlich’s campaign also unveiled a sharply negative television ad that criticizes Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (D) and her broader record on crime and gun control. Staff members said the ad would begin airing today in Baltimore and in the Washington region tomorrow.

Ehrlich said it was irresponsible for Townsend to preach about gun control when her administration has failed to prevent criminals from buying firearms because of flubbed background checks.

Last week, state and federal authorities confirmed that state archivists notified the FBI in March that it would no longer perform the required background checks because budget cuts had left them shorthanded.

Here’s a link to the Washington Post article Demosthenes quotes.

THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE HAS A STORY ABOUT AN IRAQI-AMERICAN WHO’S PRO-WAR. Hmm. Maybe he should get to know these guys.

SOMEBODY IS SHOOTING at military planes in Finland. But we’re assured it’s not terrorism.

MARK KLEIMAN V. DAVE KOPEL ON BALLISTIC FINGERPRINTING: At the ever-expanding Volokh Conspiracy.

Meanwhile, Stuart Buck wonders if the whole sniper affair was a distraction.

MICHELLE MALKIN REPORTS that the D.C. sniper case is another case of the INS dropping the ball:

Here are the facts the INS doesn’t want you to know: Lee Malvo is an illegal alien from Jamaica who jumped ship in Miami in June 2001. He was apprehended by the Border Patrol in Bellingham, Wash., in December 2001, but was then let go by the INS district in Seattle in clear violation of federal law and contrary to what the arresting Border Patrol officers intended, according to my law enforcement sources. . . .

Malvo and James traveled to Tacoma, Wash., and ended up in Bellingham. At the time of their arrest, INS records indicate, neither Malvo nor his mother had any documents proving their identities or allowing them “to be or remain in the United States legally.” The Border Patrol agents concluded that because she had “no roots or close family ties in the United States, James was likely to abscond.” The arresting officer noted that the mother-and-son illegal aliens, Malvo and James, would be “detained at the Seattle Detention facility in Seattle, Washington pending deportation charges.”

That’s not what happened. About a month after their arrest, Malvo and his mother were set free by the Seattle district INS-contrary to what the arresting Border Patrol officers had determined should be done. And in clear violation of federal law regarding the removal of illegal alien stowaways.

When you add this to the 9/11 State Department visa scandal, it seems obvious that there’s a serious problem. I wonder why Democrats aren’t after the Bush Administration to do more to protect us from dangerous and illegal immigrants?

UPDATE: John Carney points out that Malkin predicted that it would be “non-white Muslim extremists” two weeks ago. Advantage: Malkin!

I’VE ALREADY HAD ENOUGH TRAIN DERAILMENT troubles, thank you very much.

FLASH WARS: Here’s the Republican response to the DNC wheelchair ad on Social Security.

It’s pretty good, but it’s waaay late. They should have been able to have this out while the original story was still hot.

MICHAEL MOYNIHAN IS BACK AND BLOGGING AT THE POLITBURO, where he writes that extremist Islam is winning the PR battle in Sweden.

RELAX: You’re safe now.

ERNEST SVENSON is deeply unhappy with the media coverage of the sniper. Deeply unhappy — but not, sadly, disappointed.

UPDATE: Reader Andy Dombrowski has a different beef with what he’s seeing:

The battle is on…the media want to portray the arrested sniper, John Allen Muhammed, as an ex-military man, a gulf war veteran, an “expert” rifleman as qualified by the Army, whose grip on sanity was lost the longer he was in the miltary, as a man that couldn’t cope with assimiliation into civilian life. Another incarnation of Timothy McVeigh.

The true story, which won’t be portrayed by CNN or NBC, is that he likely is a deranged militant muslim fundamentalist who wanted to inflict terror on an lnnocent and unsuspecting population just like his adopted Al-Qaeda brothers in spirit.

This seems overstated, but there’s some truth to it. The bad thing is that the Hadayet case, where this clearly happened, has cost the media (and the government) so much credibility on this subject that they’ll be charged with minimizing connections to Islamic terror even if they’re balanced.

DANIEL DREZNER IS CONDEMNING a particular case of international hubris and unilateralism by a hyperpower.

EUROPEAN SOPHISTICATION: Collin May reports that — since Zimbabwe is under sanction for human-rights violations — “Europe’s foreign ministers have decided to move a meeting with the Southern African Development Community from Denmark to Mozambique. The reason for the move is simple: to accommodate the foreign minister from that pillar of humanitarianism, Zimbabwe.”

As May writes: “In this case, however, the Europeans, under threats by other southern African nations of boycotting the meeting in Denmark, have not only ignored the ban, but are actively doing all they can to assuage the whims of the dictator by moving the entire venue.

So, who’s playing rogue state now? I’d write a satire about the whole thing, but this seems to be one of those times when reality itself mocks even satire.”

And European politicians wonder why Americans don’t pay attention to their pronouncements?

SMART GUNS VOTED DOWN IN NEW JERSEY: Eugene Volokh has an interesting report.

AN INTERESTING CRITIQUE of how media organizations’ reporting winds up being effectively pro-Iraqi.

I DON’T THINK THAT WE SHOULD STRIP AMERICANS OF THEIR CITIZENSHIP for being involved in terrorism. If they’re guilty, they should be punished — with death, where justified and properly proven — but I don’t think people should lose their citizenship involuntarily. And — though possibly out of context — this quote regarding John Walker Lindh is especially lame:

“Why should he have the right of retaining his citizenship when other people have lost their lives?” asked Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., the author of the No Citizenship for Terrorists Act, which was introduced in the House early this month.

I hold no brief for Lindh, who voluntarily associated with people who were enemies of the United States. But (1) the above suggests that he killed people, which as far as we know he didn’t; and (2) if Jack Kingston thinks the penalty for doing what Lindh did is too low, he should pass a law increasing the penalty, not one stripping people of their citizenship. That’s just dumb.

HERE’S AN ASSOCIATED PRESS STORY linking John Muhammad with the Nation of Islam:

Muhammad’s training in the Army was as a machinist, according to a senior defense official, who said Muhammad had no sniper training in the Army. Another official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Associated Press that Muhammad was discharged in the mid-90s.

Muhammad changed his name last year from John Allen Williams, years after he converted to Islam, investigators told the Times.

Neither Muhammad nor Malvo was believed to be associated with the al-Qaida terrorist network or with James Ujaama, a Seattle Muslim being held on a federal terrorism charge.

“It appears that they are and have acted on their own,” Bellingham Police Chief Randy Carroll said Thursday.

Muhammad had helped provide security for Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan’s “Million Man March” in Washington, D.C., according to Leo Dudley, who lived a block from Muhammad. Nation of Islam officials in Chicago had no immediate comment.

There’s a lot of other information about Muhammad’s personal life, including stories of divorces, custody battles, and attempted abductions. Not a very nice guy, but then terrorists usually aren’t.

UPDATE: This story on how Muhammad got those New Jersey plates is interesting.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jason Rylander thinks I’ve been unfair to the media.

A .223 CALIBER RIFLE HAS BEEN FOUND IN THE CAR where John Muhammad and Lee Malvo were arrested.

Added one source: “The general sentiment is we got our guys. These are the guys.”

The map still shows Alabama as being where Mississippi should be, though. Prediction: Artificial hysteria over the “sniper culture” will soon be redirected into hysteria over “assault weapons” once a picture of the gun becomes widely available. The Islamic angle — and rumored connections to Louis Farrakhan, which are showing up on several email lists, but nowhere that I can find to link to — will be downplayed.

UPDATE: I’m off to teach in a few minutes, but the IndePundit is updating steadily. And so is Jim Henley, who is calling former Gulf War soldier Muhammad the “black Tim McVeigh.” Though that would be the black, Islamic, Tim McVeigh. Does this add to the credibility of claims that McVeigh’s anti-Americanism had Iraqi connections?

And here’s the latest on the Chechen-terrorist standoff in Moscow, which seems to be going badly.

I TOLD YOU SO: Record-company copyright enforcers are making it impossible for musicians to sell their own music on eBay:

Less than three weeks after he started his first auction, Ziemann received the first of what would become an endless string of notes — sometimes from actual staff members, but more often in the form of auto-response e-mails — telling him his auction had been shuttered because somebody had fingered him as a thief.

Over the next month, he tried to find out who had fingered him and what he could do to get his auction back up. The constant back and forth eventually soured Ziemann — who runs a website and retail service from his home — on eBay altogether.

“We no longer have any interest in selling our product there. Ever,” Ziemann wrote in an e-mail.

With media companies upping their online enforcement of copyright law, cases of mistaken identity like Ziemann’s could be on the rise. Again, eBay would not comment on its policing policy, but several companies scour the Internet looking for copyrighted materials.

I wrote about mistaken enforcement efforts here, — but the important point is that from the record industry’s viewpoint, this sort of thing isn’t a bug — it’s a feature. This is all about closing down alternative channels of distribution, not about protecting intellectual property.

UPDATE: And read this, too. It argues that independent musicians are actually being targeted for this sort of thing.

THE WORLD WIDE RANT has discovered that MSNBC can’t tell the difference between Alabama and Mississippi, even with a map.

ORRIN JUDD ACCUSES RICHARD COHEN of politically-motivated dishonesty in his latest column on Bush:

Particularly when you consider that Mr. Cohen and Ms Dowd and the others have repeatedly stated that they too think there’s a case for removing Saddam–in this very story Mr. Cohen says, “A case for war exists.”–it’s very difficult to accept that these increasingly hysterical columns aren’t being driven by the fact that there’s a mid-term election just days away and that the establishment Left is trying its best to diminish the President before voters go to the polls and elect candidates who support him.

Now, there are plenty of tried and true reasons for liberals to oppose Mr. Bush and his agenda. Everthing he proposes to do in the future–from extending free trade to cutting taxes to limiting abortion to privatizing Social Security to voucherizing public education to providing social assistance through faith-based institutions–is anathema to the Left. So argue the issues. Make your case to the American people on the level of ideas and their consequences. Are these good reasons not enough? Do Mr. Cohen and his ilk really need to stoop to lies?

Charles Austin, sadly, is on hiatus and has nothing to add to this discussion.

FISKING WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR? That’s what it looks like to me. See what you think.