THE SMOKING GUN HAS AN INTERESTING DOCUMENT on FBI eavesdropping:

It was there that, in February 2000, FBI agents secretly began videotaping Abdel-Rahman’s legal visits (bugging of his telephone calls with lawyers began in June 2000). The eavesdropping was conducted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which, in the name of national security, authorizes secret electronic surveillance aimed at gathering foreign intelligence. The initial Minnesota warrant came 15 months after the FBI began FISA surveillance on the home telephone of Sattar, whose e-mail and fax traffic was also later intercepted by government agents.

“February 2000?” But wait — I thought that when Ashcroft proposed eavesdropping on lawyer/client conferences it was a threat to freedom without precedent in American legal history! Now we find out that it was being done under Clinton/Reno, too! And nobody’s remarked on it. Go figure.

I guess that the people who were complaining about Ashcroft just don’t read The Smoking Gun. Yeah, that must be it.

WE KEEP HEARING that Mohammed Atta’s Prague meeting with an Iraqi intelligence agent didn’t happen. But that’s not what the Czechs are saying.

GUN-O-RAMA TUESDAY: The New Mexico Supreme Court has ruled the state’s concealed-handgun law unconstitutional — because it lets cities and counties ban concealed guns.

BERKELEY HATEWATCH UPDATE: According to this report, the District Attorney is planning to drop charges against the pro-Palestinian rioters who occupied Wheeler Hall, though they will have to pay court costs and may still face disciplinary action from the University.

That’s not terribly unusual in the aftermath of disturbances where no one is seriously injured, but it’s troubling. Would they have done this if the identical behavior had been perpetrated by, say, Klan sympathizers? I doubt it.

I’d still like to see the SFSU videotape made public. (Via an email from Zachary Barbera).

KRISTOF WATCH: Just noticed that Jeff Goldstein had the same reaction I did to Nick Kristof’s gun-show column today:

Now, perhaps I’m hypersensitive to these kinds of things, but Jolly Old Slant Nick seems to’ve larded down his prose with a bunch of caricaturish signifiers meant to demean and villify gun enthusiasts. I mean, Confederate flags, Nick? Fuse wire? Sexist, gun-lovin’, hickish bumper stickers? “Concealed” handguns?

The only thing missing from Kristof’s heavily-armed strawman city is the tobacco-spittin Mayor, a moron in camouflage who “ain’t gonna sell no gun to no Jew,” but “sure as shit’ll shoot me some. Yeeehawwww!”

Here’s a tip, Nick: Until you start taking gun owners seriously, the educated folks who believe in the Second Amendment will dismiss you as irrelevant.

Indeed.

MEDIAWHORESONLINE is getting some press in Salon (but you’ll have to pay to read it) and some defenses from Eric Alterman and TAPPED. But bloggers at MediaWhoresOnlineWatch have been on this case for a while, and they dispute claims that MWO is accurate.

Advantage: Blogosphere! But did they call Alterman for his opinion?

RYAN ZEMPEL AT C-LOG is unhappy with this story about senior citizens shacking up. It doesn’t seem so bad to me. But then, I had already read this New York Times story about sex at a senior-citizens’ home, which I found rather sweet.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding Zempel, but I don’t see the problem here. Heck, it’s a lot less of an issue than teen sex! You’ve got no worries about pregnancy. STDs seem low-risk, and at any rate are a minor issue compared with the other health problems these folks have. Shacking up even protects your heirs from having someone else take part of their inheritance. I don’t think there’s a consequentialist argument here at all: just a basically religious argument against sex outside of marriage.

Fine. Believe that if you want. But don’t expect people who don’t share that religious belief to pay any attention. And don’t pretend that’s not what you’re doing — as “social” conservatives so often do, dressing up essentially religious arguments in social-policy garb, something that Zempel, to his credit, isn’t doing.

HUH. The Mars piece that Kopel and I have in NRO is now on Slashdot. Overall, the comments are kind of disappointing, especially for such a tech-savvy crowd. Here’s a good one, though.

A few commenters seem to think that Kopel and I would be upset if colonies on Mars demanded their independence at some future date. Actually, I would be disappointed if they didn’t.

BELLICOSE LIBERAL: Eric Alterman asks ” who is Bin Laden’s Dick Cheney? That’s the man we need to kill.”

SPEAKING OF GUNS: A bunch of people have emailed me about this Richard Cohen column for this rather offensive line: “I am, like all reasonable people, in favor of the tightest restrictions on guns.” (Emphasis added). Sadly, Cohen probably sincerely believes this statement to be true.

But that’s not the story. The story is that Cohen is endorsing armed pilots, more or less. Which means that by listening to Norman Mineta and Tom Ridge, Bush has managed to get himself to the left of Richard Cohen on guns!

I agree with Jim Glassman. There’s something seriously wrong at the White House. It certainly gives this conversation reported by Matt Welch more credibility.

BELLESILES UPDATE: There’s an interesting debate among historians that people who have been following L’Affaire Bellesiles may want to check out. It starts with this article by Don Williams on History News Network, suggesting that the reliance of so many pro-gun-control historians on Bellesiles’ work may undermine their case across the board. This post on H-Net (a historians’ email list) drew this response from historian Jack Rakove, who (though he has never actually admitted that Bellesiles’ work is false) says that individual-rights supporters want to focus on Bellesiles because it hurts the credibility of the entire “collective rights” position. Anti-gun historian Peter Hoffer agrees with Rakove saying that the “collective rights” case is still strong even without Bellesiles (though his reference to the “well regulated militia” language in the Second Amendment is astonishingly ahistorical for, well, a historian). Finally, Williams responds at length here pointing out a number of errors within Rakove’s analysis.

I find this exchange interesting mostly because it indicates that even those who previously defended Bellesiles are now falling back to an alternative line of argument, and suggesting that it’s somehow not sporting for people to criticize anti-gun arguments by pointing out that they’re built on his apparently-fraudulent research.

This would be more persuasive if Rakove et al. would come right out and call Bellesiles’ work fraudulent and retract the statements they’ve made in reliance upon it. Since they’re not yet willing to do that, they still have a credibility problem. Put simply, why should we listen to people who are either so gullible that they were taken in by research that should have raised red flags with anyone who knew anything about the subject — and why should we trust people so ideologically committed to a particular outcome that they are still unwilling to admit the truth about it?

BRINK LINDSEY has evidence that central planning works. Er, as long as by “works” you means “succeeds in implementing really stupid ideas.”

MORE ON MARS! Dave Kopel and I have a piece in The National Review Online. I won’t spoil it with a description.

THIS WHOLE BLOGGER-SEX THING is getting out of hand.

UPDATE: Reader Richard Whitten writes:

Can we change the subject from the sexiest blogger to something else? The

sexiest blogger is obviously UNABLOGGER, because as far as I know UNABLOGGER is the only blogger who posts photos regularly. And nice ones.

Well, there you have it.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH EURO-INTELLECTUALS, a potentially endless series: Meryl Yourish has found an Italian writer who thinks that fascism is about “an extreme cult of personal freedom.” Oh, yeah. We beat Hitler and Mussolini to keep them from imposing freedom on the whole world. Jeez. This guy is so dumb he should work for Jack Valenti — who, come to think of it, embraces a somewhat similar worldview.

CORNEL WEST UPDATE: Cornel West has left Harvard for Princeton. Henry Louis Gates is staying at Harvard, where he now has the chance to replace West with an actual scholar (or, given West’s infalted salary and perks, probably two). Hmm. A reader emails that this may have been Gates’ clever plan all along.

ABIGAIL TRAFFORD on the Chandra Levy / cloning connection.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone. — Jack Valenti, 1982.

I found this via Subaverage, where you can read the entire, hilarious, transcript. Why does anybody listen to this guy?

Oh, yeah. He pays ’em to.

NICK KRISTOF IS REWRITING PRESS RELEASES from the Violence Policy Center and the Brady Campaign and passing the result off as an oped. Again.

What’s more, I’ve been to gun shows, and Kristof’s pastiche of leftie stereotypes is unconvincing. Did he even actually attend the show he says he visited?

UPDATE: Reader Jeff Paulsen says Kristof is either lying or incredibly gullible:

Quote from the article: ‘As I tried the feel of a used $129.95 Polish assault rifle with a handy bayonet, the seller beamed. “That’s a powerful gun,” he said. “It’s the only one I know that can put a round through bulletproof glass.”‘

Somebody is full of shit, here. Most any hunting rifle will shoot through “bulletproof” things just fine. (“Bulletproof” is really about proof against handgun bullets.) Either we have an unscrupulous seller lying to make his sale, or Kristof making up details and quotes to demonize gun shows.

For that price, it was probably an SKS, firing the 7.62×39 cartridge – ballistically equivalent to Granddad’s 30-30, and good on deer. It is also debatable whether or not the SKS is an “assault rifle” – it fires semi-automatically from a 10-round fixed magazine.

Yes. The quotes ring false to me — but it’s possible that some folks were just having fun with a guy whose chief claim to firearms expertise appears to be that he’s had guns pointed at him.

THE CIA SAYS THE FBI IS LYING, and that it did in fact warn the FBI about hijacker Khalid Almihdhar. I’m not enjoying this, but at least somebody’s beginning to look at what went wrong.

MY FORMER LAW PROFESSOR STEPHEN CARTER has a new novel out, for which he received a near-record advance for a novice author. It’s reviewed rather unkindly in the New York Times today. I can’t help suspecting that the huge advance elevated the reviewer’s expectations, which I suppose is inevitable.

GRAY DAVIS UPDATE: Edward Boyd deploys one of his trademark tables to explain the situation.

CONSPIRACY THEORY? Or just a conspiracy? A reader writes to note some odd events in Memphis. It’s pretty well summed up in this story. Harvard virologist Don Wiley disappeared in Memphis and was found dead. A fake-driver’s license ring involving Middle Eastern men was broken up, and Katherine Smith, the state driver’s license examiner who was involved in it was murdered. (More details on that case here). Now the chief medical examiner, O.C. Smith (I don’t know if he’s any relation to Katherine — apparently not, as the story doesn’t mention it) who handled both autopsies has been attacked and left bound with barbed wire and with a bomb attached to him (he was found and lived).

Authorities are blaming anti-abortion types for the latest attack, but you have to wonder about all these coincidences. It’s, er, like something out of a thriller novel.

UPDATE: There’s a story in today’s (Tuesday’s New York Times with further details on why the authorities are blaming a particular (unknown) letter-writer, though this story suggests the writer is more interested in the death penalty than in abortion.

DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY: Actually, Tom Palmer says Francis Fukuyama gets his history wrong on a couple of crucial subjects.

BELLESILES UPDATE: Eugene Volokh has some comments about Bellesiles’ claims that he’s being subjected to a form of McCarthyism. Excerpt:

Refresh my recollection, please: Did Joe McCarthy really limit himself to (1) publicizing substantial charges of academic misconduct, charges that are backed by the views of many reputable scholars, and (2) asking that his name be withdrawn from fellowships awarded to people who engaged in such misconduct? Somehow I think that if this were so, the term “McCarthyism” would have a very different connotation than it does today.

Indeed.