PATRICK RUFFINI is fact-checking Brian Williams. He’s more polite, but. . . .

MATT WELCH is fact-checking Eric Alterman. Welch’s conclusion: he lies like a big yellow dog.

READER DOUG TURNBULL found a picture of the EU’s new bar-code flag. Jeez is that hideous. Could this possibly be an effort by anti-EU moles?

TAPPED is giving me the credit (via my scholarly work, not InstaPundit) for bringing about the Justice Department’s new position on the Second Amendment. I think they exaggerate my importance (Larry Tribe, no right-winger, basically agrees with me on this) but that’s okay. If you’re interested, here’s a link to one of my scholarly pieces on the subject, and here’s another. And here’s a shorter, non-scholarly piece that I did for Legal Affairs, the new legal magazine edited by Lincoln Caplan and published by Yale Law School.

UPDATE: By the way, if you read this article from TAP in August, which is quoted in the TAPPED item above, you find this now-hilarious statement:

Another article, by Emory University’s Michael Bellesiles–whose Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture won the coveted Bancroft Prize for American History and Diplomacy last year–accused Ashcroft’s intellectual allies of engaging in quotation hunting rather than taking on “the hard and time-consuming task of archival research.”

Maybe Bellesiles should have done a little more of that “archival research” himself.

FRITZ HOLLINGS — BRINGING BACK THE STAR CHAMBER? My new TechCentralStation column is up.

A POLITE AND CULTURED FAN OF NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO WRITES:

Don’t be a dope. NPR is public radio because it’s supported by its LISTENERS, who presumably value Diane Rehm over Rush Limbaugh. The taxpayer-dollar support of public radio (CPR) is down to pennies, as we’re reminded constantly during pledge week.

I’m sure, in our lifetimes, we’ll see those pennies reduced to nothing, and will you be happy then? After all, I patronize lots of businesses that advertise on our loathsome talk-radio station, so I guess part of my money goes to subsidize the morning-drive guy who thinks it’s hilarious to make jokes calling a Hispanic and a Jew “a taco and a bagel.” My feeling is, it’s not worth getting upset about; it all comes out in the wash.

So what if Diane Rehm supports gun control? She had you on her show, and I’ll bet she was a damn sight more polite to you than Bill O’Reilly is to the guests he disagrees with.

Hmm. Where to start? NPR was called “public radio” long before its listeners started shelling out. It’s now listener-financed to a large degree because it’s sufficiently unpopular with taxpayers that it has to turn for support to the niche market that it actually appeals to. Nothing wrong with that, but nothing “public” about it either.

As for Rehm and O’Reilly: It’s OK for Rehm to support gun control — it’s just dishonest for her to deny that she’s a liberal. That’s like Rush Limbaugh saying he’s not a conservative. And on the politeness front, Rehm was more polite than O’Reilly is to people he disagrees with — heck she was more polite than he was with me when I was on his show and I think he agreed with what I was saying, though it’s hard to be sure because I could barely get a word in edgewise.

In truth, though, I’ve seen O’Reilly be awfully polite to people he disagrees with, so that’s probably a cheap shot. He’s not rude — he just can’t keep quiet. It’s also a bit lame to conflate tax money — which is money you’re forced to pay — with money that you spend at businesses that advertise on a particular station. Don’t want to patronize Taco Bell? Nobody will show up at your house with guns. Don’t want to pay your taxes? Expect a different response.

UPDATE: Reader George Moore writes:

A couple of points regarding your post about radio talk show hosts. Limbaugh rarely has guests on his show. There are times when a political figure will phone (I recall one show when Bill Bennett seemed to be calling from a pay phone someplace in the Carolinas), but they are few and far between.

On Bill O’Reilly’s TV show, or one of them, anyway, they do have guests, and they are frequently of leftist tilt. Unfortunately, this frequently degenerates into O’Reilly and his guest attempting to talk over each other for five minutes, but the guests are on the show. Your point about public radio is well-taken. However, it should be pointed out that hosts like Limbaugh and O’Reilly are frankly opining from a political position. They make no secret of it. The main objection to the so-called main-stream media is that they firmly maintain a political position, middle to hard left depending on the show or story, but refuses to acknowledge it.

Case in point: I was listening to Bloomberg radio in New York this morning. They delivered a news item stating that the Justice Department had broken with its past position on the meaning of the Second Amendment. Fair enough. It has. They then went on to an ad-hom attack on John Ashcroft, stating that the new take on the Second Amendment merely reflected his personal view.

I was hoping to hear how Mr. Ashcroft got Mr. Tribe (D. Harvard), to endorse this bizarre new view of the Second Amendment, but they dropped it after a swipe at Bush.

Yes, it’s the unacknowledged but obvious bias of NPR that sticks in most people’s throats.

MARK STEYN heaps scorn on the British press for its hysterical and credulous treatment of the non-existent Jenin “massacre”:

The Palestinians themselves put the death toll at — wait for it — 56.

That’s right. 56. There are no missing zeroes on the end. The only missing zeroes are those gullible British and European hacks who swallowed that line about hundreds of dead civilians but have fallen mysteriously silent as the figures have been revised downward. . . . So, 52-56. Hmm. Where have I heard those numbers before? Why, in another famous media illusion — “the brutal Afghan winter”, under whose grueling conditions Kabul this January had to cope with average daytime Fahrenheit temperatures of … 52-56! It would, however, be unfair to suggest that in every ludicrous Fleet Street fiction the correct figure will prove to be 52-56. For example, when the Yanks were torturing al-Qaeda suspects in “the searing heat of Guantanamo”, the overnight low was 66 and breezy, or about the same as a late January day in Kandahar in the brutal Afghan winter, when the warlords and their catamites stroll arm in arm down the sun-dappled streets.

Personally, I think the number should be 42.

THE TRUTH ABOUT PIM FORTUYN: From InstaPundit’s de facto Amsterdam correspondent, Adam Curry. A very nice essay. Lots of info over on Andrew Sullivan‘s site, too.

UPDATE: A reader sends a link to this BBC item by John Simpson and asks “Is it me, or is this a rather spiteful piece?” It’s not you.

THIS WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE ON TALK RADIO says that it tilts right. Well, yeah. But what’s amusing is the rejoinder to a statement by Bill O’Reilly that NPR is all left:

Besides, he adds, dangling new bait, “[National Public Radio] is all left, top to bottom. That’s where the left goes. . . . They listen to Diane Rehm.”

Rehm, the host of an NPR-distributed show out of WAMU-FM in Washington, replies: “If a liberal is a talk radio host who represents more than just one view, then I am indeed a liberal. . . . I’ve never felt there’s just one way and one way only. [Some hosts] espouse one view over and over again, whereas our message is far more confusing because we’re open to ideas and let you make up your own mind.”

I don’t know. I don’t listen to Rehm, which isn’t available in Knoxville, but I’ve been on her show talking about gun control and her mind was pretty clearly made up there. And she made a point of letting me, and the listeners, know on the air just how much she disagreed with me.

To be fair, she had me on the show espousing a view she disagreed with, even if she obviously took the side of Tom Diaz, who was the pro-gun-control guest. But then, a lot of right-wing talk-radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Neal Boortz have liberal guests, and promise that liberal callers will go to the head of the line. And bias in NPR is different, isn’t it, since it’s (allegedly) public radio?

ASSASSINATIONS. RIOTS. ECONOMIC COLLAPSE. But never fear — the EU is on top of it. They’ve designed a new logo:

Forget the stars, hail the stripes. The European Union’s image is set for an overhaul, with the replacement of its gold star flag by a dazzling new bar-code-style logo.

The new design, which has been commissioned from the ultra-fashionable Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, will bleed all of the colours of the national flags of EU nations alongside each other.

Ooh. A bar code — that’ll show all those people who say the EU is going to make them into indistinguishable cogs in a great supranational machine!

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: I’m really not convinced these guys are up to the job of fighting terrorism. Or anything else.

REUTERS BLOWS IT AGAIN: First it was “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” (Uh, no, not unless he’s fighting for, you know, freedom). But now Reuters seems to be taking the position that one man’s Tennessee is another man’s Kentucky — which I, at least, find quite offensive.

BRENDAN NYHAN has a followup piece on the Susan Schmidt affair — she’s the Washington Post reporter who responded to hostile but non-abusive reader emails by trying to get the readers fired. I guess it’s the usual media double standard at work.

A LESSON FROM OXFORD in what makes America great.

SECURITY is still lousy at USDA labs handling dangerous pathogens, according to an Inspector General’s report.

I WAS GOING TO REPLY to Chris Patten’s silly and offensive op-ed in the Post (and the EU-niks call American diplomacy unsubtle?) but, heck, just go read what Jeff Goldstein says. Sasha Castel isn’t happy, either.

JOSH MARSHALL agrees with Mickey Kaus that Tony Blair’s statement on Pim Fortuyn’s death could have been a bit more, um, forthcoming.

CAIR AT THE CHRONICLE? John J. Miller noted a San Francisco Chronicle poll on the racial privacy initiative at 10:01 p.m. — the initiative was ahead with 59% of the vote. Now at 10:18 p.m. it’s returning a 404 error. Hmm.

UPDATE: It’s been moved to the front page, apparently (scroll down on the right).

PIPEBOMB BOY UPDATE: IUMA has apparently taken down his song, but the Hoosier Review has it in MP3 form.

EUROLUDDISM AND ITS REFUGEES: Reader Chris Fox writes:

With all the other stuff going on in Europe yesterday it was easy to miss, but the WSJ has a big article today on Swiss drug maker Novartis’ partial exit from the Continent. Seems that Novartis brass have come to terms with the fact that Europe is a swiftly falling star in the world of pharmaceutical research, and announced that they would be moving all research to the Boston area. Put this news up against the mass exodus of
European drug companies over the past few years to New Jersey(!) and you’ve got another dead rat on the European Union’s collective kitchen floor. The Journal article does a great job laying the groundwork and explaining how socialized medicine has already killed the Euro’s will to compete or innovate.

Yes, I saw the article in today’s print WSJ. Well, it’s not just socialized medicine — though that plays its part — but also the general antitechnology attitude among the Greens, the Killer Vegan Animal Rights Loonies, and so on.

Of course, it looks like Pipebomb Boy may be one of those last himself. Loser.

JOE KATZMAN SAYS that the IRA may have just won the war against Britain.

OSAMA THINKS WE’RE STUPID:

Well, it was bound to happen. Israel pulled back from the occupied terror-tories, again. They let Arafat go, again. And there was a suicide bombing, again. Is anyone really surprised at this? . . . There is a “piece process,” alright. We’re taking Israel apart piece by piece, with the complicity-by-complacency of the EU, and the waffling of the Americans.

AND NOW FOR SOME POSITIVE NEWS: More progress in nanotechnology.

JAY MANIFOLD WEIGHS IN on what the Pim Fortuyn assassination is likely to mean.

DEAD MICROBIOLOGISTS: The Rapmaster points out this article from a Memphis alt-weekly back in March. And he linked to it back in March. Advantage: Rapmaster!

UPDATE: And, courtesy of reader Michael Levy, here’s a posting from FreeRepublic from December, back when there were only five dead microbiologists. Advantage: FreeRepublic.