TOM LANTOS is demanding an investigation of UNRWA complicity in terrorism.

IF YOU’RE INTERESTED IN GUNS and gun policy, you’ll likely be interested in this new book from NYU Press. It’s by Andrew McClurg, Dave Kopel & Brannon Denning and it looks at both pro- and anti-gun literature. I haven’t seen the actual book yet, but I read a copy of the manuscript last year and I thought it was excellent.

D.C. POLICE may have found Chandra Levy’s body in Rock Creek Park, according to this report, though at the moment they’re not even sure the body they’ve found is female.

UPDATE: The Washington Post now reports that it’s her.

BIZARRO WORLD: Fresh from spinning for the Bush Administration, TAPPED is now praising Jonah Goldberg. Will this madness never cease?

MARS: A TEST FOR THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT. My TechCentralStation column for this week is up.

NEW YORK MAGAZINE’S MARK HOROWITZ sends this column on defeatism in the war on terror. He also gives me permission to reprint it in full here and to solicit your suggestions for additional items:

May 22, 2002 — “There will be another terrorist attack. We will not be able to stop it. It’s something we all live with.”
– FBI director Robert Mueller, to the National Association of
District Attorneys

IF FBI director Robert Mueller had been in the Green Bay Packers locker room at half time during the first Super Bowl instead of Vince Lombardi: “Boys, we’re gonna get beat and beat bad, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.”

* If Mueller had delivered the statement to the troops on the eve of D-Day instead of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Men, no matter how well we plan this thing, half of you are gonna die anyway. I wish there was something else I could do. Good luck.”

* If Mueller, not Gen. Anthony McAuliffe, had commanded the 101st Airborne in Bastogne: “To the men and officers of the division: The krauts have got our nuts in a vise. As of 0300 hours, it’s every man for himself.”

* If Mueller had been elected president in 1932 instead of FDR: “We have nothing to fear . . . except this damned depression, which is probably going to destroy everything we hold near and dear.”

* Mueller, if he was at the Battle of Mobile Bay instead of Adm. David Farragut: “Damn! Torpedoes! There’s too many of them. I’m out of here.”

* If Mueller were aboard the Chesapeake instead of Capt. James Lawrence: “Give up the ship!”

* If Mueller delivered the Second Inaugural instead of President Abraham Lincoln: “If the last drop of blood drawn by the lash is answered by one drawn by the sword, the price would simply be too high. It’s time to negotiate.”

* And if Mueller wrote Teddy Roosevelt’s speeches: “Walk softly, and maybe no one will notice you.”

Mark Horowitz is articles editor of New York Magazine.

I’m going to try enabling comments on this. If it works, you can add your own versions here.

UPDATE: Doesn’t seem to be working. I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, email ’em to me at .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Comments are working. Fire away!

U.S. / MEXICAN BORDER CLASH? I don’t want to make too much of this report, but it’s worth keeping your eyes on. I suspect that as the border tightens from its current very lax state to a merely somewhat lax state, a lot of people, especially people with Mexican army and police connections, will feel the pressure.

SUMAN PALIT says that I’m way too optimistic in my assessment of the likelihood of Pakistan/India nuclear war.

Well, dang. I hope he’s wrong. I’d say the chance is somewhere between one in ten and one in fifty. I’m hoping for the latter.

Just explain this to me: if you’re Musharraf, what, exactly, makes you think starting a nuclear war is a good idea? Here are some possibilities:

1. “We’ll win! Big time! Thanks to our precision weaponry we’ll destroy India’s ability to hurt us with only minor damage on our end!” If they think that, the Pakistanis may well launch. But thinking that doesn’t just require you to be crazy, it requires you to be utterly, utterly, out of touch with reality. Even by the standards of the region. I don’t think they’re that out of touch. My belief is tempered somewhat, of course, by the knowledge that such military miscalculations are not exactly unheard of.

2. “Well, we’ll be largely obliterated, but it’s better than . . . .” Better than what, exactly? Losing political power in Pakistan? Leaders start wars sometimes to shore up their political positions, but it’s hard to see how a nuclear war could do that.

3. “India’s sure to launch a nuclear strike on us soon, so we might as well strike first with all we’ve got.” At last, a measure of rationality creeps in. I think the first part is unlikely — but it’s not what I think, it’s what Musharraf and his fellow mucky-mucks think that matters, and they might think this way, especially if India gives them reason. This, to me, is the highest-probability scenario for nuclear war.

4. “Who cares if we’re obliterated! We’ll die gloriously in the process of killing many infidels! And it will inspire a worldwide conflagration that, with Allah’s aid, will leave Islam on top of the heap again, just like it was before we all turned suddenly and inexplicably dumb as rocks back in the 14th century!” This is the Ladenite line, but if Musharraf thinks this way (Palit says he does) I haven’t seen much evidence of it. I’ve seen more evidence that Musharraf has Kemalist sympathies and wants to create a union of Turkic peoples under his general leadership. This is rather incompatible with Ladenism, though tactical alliances are of course possible along the way. I don’t know much about the views of other high-level Pakistani military types, though.

So those are the grounds for my wild optimism. Though if this be optimism. . . .

UPDATE: Stratfor reports that the United States is offering increased space cooperation with India in exchange for India standing down a bit. As a short-term move this will probably defuse tensions a bit. As a long term move it builds up India’s technological capability vis-a-vis less-appealing regional powers like Pakistan and China. India doesn’t have precision-weapons capability now. It will in the future, and the technological balance between India and Pakistan (or for that matter, India and China) is only going to favor India more over time.

Hmm. Could that be a reason for Pakistan to strike? Or for China to encourage Pakistan to strike?

Remember. I’m the optimist here.

I’VE SPENT SOME TIME over the past several months pointing out the increased arrogance and reduced professionalism of the Secret Service (here’s an example). Now comes this story by Chitra Ragavan in U.S. News & World Report about an agent who exposed missing (and presumably stolen) money, unlocked evidence vaults, and other bits of sloppiness and criminality. Naturally, he’s being punished.

This stuff is bad enough in peacetime. In wartime, such behavior on the part of law enforcement and intelligence operations can’t be tolerated. Though exactly how this became a race-discrimination case isn’t clear to me. I don’t think they’d treat any whistleblower better, regardless of race. Even the agent in question says the culture at the Secret Service is that you don’t tattle on your boss.

It would be nice if the culture was more along the lines of “bosses don’t misbehave,” though, wouldn’t it?

INSTAPUNDIT’S NEW SITE is currently number 7 on blogdex. Now if the domain name servers would just get the world.

BTW, you can bookmark the numeric “hard URL” shown above. Though people are calling it a “temporary” address, it really isn’t temporary. It’s just that the alphabetic instapundit.com address will also work once the DNS fairies have done their magic.

JOHN SCALZI says we should legalize pot, so that we can get over trying to kill off marijuana usage, and instead attack the real evil: the pot culture that has subjected us to jam bands, Ben & Jerry, and hemp underwear. Once marijuana’s legal, he figures, all that stuff will lose its rebellious appeal and wither away. Scalzi concludes:

You may think it’s asinine to legalize pot simply to squash stoner culture and make potheads change the subject. But just think–if it works, we can use this strategy in other ways to make life more pleasant for the rest of us. Today the tokers, tomorrow PETA. Hell, I’d happily go vegetarian to have the lot of them drowned in a sack.

John Scalzi: repressive tolerance for the 21st century!

ANNA FRANCO (who is actually my cousin-in-law, or something like that) has some thoughts on how war movies need to change now that we’re actually, you know, at war:

What if Rick (Humphrey Bogart) in Casablanca started complaining that the resistance members were too hard on the Nazis? What if Virgil Hilts (Steve McQueen) in The Great Escape pondered, as he race[d] toward the Swiss border, whether he should reconsider the legitimacy of the Third Reich’s negative feelings towards the U.S.?

The whole obligatory-moral-ambiguity schtick needs to go, she says. We’re better than them, and we should say so plainly.

MATTHEW HOY says he’s identified a case of theft from the blogosphere. He’s referring to this column by Kathleen Parker, but I think he may overstate the case a bit.

The similarity between Parker’s column and some widely reproduced comments from Charles Johnson’s website (reproduced in Hoy’s post) is strong. But the words are different, the ideas are not quite identical, and though the commenter on Johnson’s website expressed it very well, the idea that if Bush had rounded up a bunch of Arab men on, say, 9/10 he would have been accused of racism, Gestapo tactics, etc., wasn’t actually expressed there for the first time.

UPDATE: If you follow the link to Hoy’s site and click on “comments,” you’ll see that the guy who posted the original item on Charles Johnson’s site says Parker didn’t steal anything from him.

ANDREW SULLIVAN comments on the InstaPundit redesign. He says he’s frightened, and you should be too.

Strangely, I’m pleased.

JEFF GOLDSTEIN is amused by TAPPED’s enthusiasm for the new Alterman blog. Or maybe bemused.

UPDATE: Patrick Nielsen Hayden is, too.

“A BLOG BURST” — That’s what Joe Katzman is calling for with regard to SFSU.

UPDATE: Meryl Yourish has some additional thoughts, and reflections on the value of videotape.

VIRGINIA POSTREL explains the facts of life for Professional Journalists. Boy am I doing everything wrong!

Oh, wait — I’m not a Professional Journalist. Never mind.

UPDATE: And after reading this Ken Layne dissection of a dumb piece by a Professional Journalist at NBC, I’m kinda glad.

THE NEW INSTAPUNDIT URL is now #10 on Daypop. Cool.

WHILE I’VE BEEN PRAISING STACY TABB’S TECHNICAL SKILLS, Jim Treacher’s been praising her boobies. But then, Treacher was always more of a gentleman.

WILL WARREN, the poet laureate of the Blogosphere, has outdone himself with this one. It’s not cutesy, or inside-funny, or just clever.

It’s great.

EU SUED FOR PROMOTING TERROR! Mary Robinson a war criminal! It’s all at Global News Watch.

FISKAYAMA! My spoonerized would-be nemesis, IsntaPundit, administers a thorough Fisking to Francis Fukuyama. Excerpt: “It is ironic that Fukuyama can bemoan the possibility of a ‘Posthuman Future’ even as he calls on us to cease the most categorically human of behaviors: the pursuit of knowledge.

“Fukuyama’s case is hopeless, of course. Trying to prevent humans from seeking knowledge is a doomed proposition. But it’s worth dissecting his views, if only to see how befuddled, gloomy, and unscrupulous is this enemy of science.” The whole thing, which features a paragraph-by-paragraph dissection of Fukuyama’s Salon interview that makes clear just how little actual argument there is to his arguments, is very much worth reading.

THE OTHER DAY I posted that I didn’t think a nuclear war between India and Pakistan was all that likely. Richard Bennett is less optimistic.

FLIT announces that Canada is pulling out of the war on terrorism. But I don’t think Americans should take it personally. After all, they’re also turning a major Army facility into a homeless shelter, to Bruce’s immense disgust.

A CORRECTION: While I do say “fact check your ass” from time to time, it’s Ken Layne who coined the term. This article from The Guardian gives the impression that the term is uniquely mine, which it isn’t — either by origination or by frequency of use.

Hey, I just “fact-checked the ass” of an article over the phrase “fact-checking your ass.” I think that should get me the recursive metablogging medal of the day. Or at least a good seed in the recursive metablogging tournament.