AUGH! THEY’RE ALL AROUND ME! It’s another redesigned and relocated weblog courtesy of the all-powerful, all-loved Sekimori.

THE PALESTINIAN AIR FORCE downs its first plane.

KEN LAYNE — whose page today is full of cool thoughts and history about blogging — also disagrees with the Larry Miller piece from The Weekly Standard that I linked to earlier. Layne notes that the Israeli Ambassador said it was an accident, and adds: “I had a 2 a.m. electrical fire in my office last month, and had I not been sitting right underneath the blue flames shooting from the outlet, my 100-year-old piece-of-crap house would be ashes today. It happens.” Yeah, it does.

HERE’S MORE ON CIVILIAN CASUALTIES from the L.A. Times. Basically, the Taliban deliberately inflated casualty claims in order to win Western sympathy, helped along by supporters and useful idiots like Marc Herold:

On Oct. 31 in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, Taliban officials escorted selected journalists to what they said was a clinic destroyed by an American airstrike. The journalists reported that 10 to 15 civilians had died. The story received widespread circulation in the Arab world via the Afghan Islamic Press, a pro-Taliban agency.

The site actually was an Al Qaeda military post and a small clinic for Taliban wounded located next to a private home, according to an Afghan security guard who said he witnessed the bombing. Interviewed at the site, guard Abdul Salam said several Al Qaeda fighters and two or three civilians from the private home were among those killed.

Khalid Pushtoon, an official with the new Kandahar government, said when asked about the incident: “A clinic? That was no clinic. That place was full of Arabs,” a reference to foreign Al Qaeda fighters.

Why is it that people who are convinced that the Pentagon lies about everything find it so hard to believe that America’s enemies lie about anything?

JEREMY LOTT has a review of Sen. Bill Frist’s new book on bioterrorism in Christianity Today.

JOHN SCALZI SAYS that the new MSNBC “blogs” are phony exercises in marketing rather than true blogs.

UPDATE: The always-erudite Dr. Weevil has some constructive criticisms for Eric Alterman.

AMY WELBORN defends C.S. Lewis. My daughter and I read all the way through the Narnia books this year. I loved them when I was a kid, and they’re even better as an adult. Anybody who savages Lewis is an idiot, as far as I’m concerned.

MICKEY KAUS TRACKS WELFARE REFORM using hip-hop / R&B lyrics.

WOBBLY WATCH WRIT LARGE: Jim Glassman is savaging George Bush for abandoning his principles, and he has a pretty damning list of principles that have been abandoned.

UPDATE: I just noticed this Charles Murtaugh post on how Democrats can outflank Bush on the right using the war. I think he’s right. That would peel off a lot of Bush supporters who are sick of Powellesque temporizing and Minetan bullshit. And that’s, well, most of Bush’s supporters.

ERIC ALTERMAN wonders why nobody is paying attention to reports that parts of Afghanistan were designated free-fire zones. He should read blogs more or at least read more blogs: Flit has researched the sources, and so has Nick Marsala. Tim Blair has more information, too. None of this is doing much to enhance the credibility of the charges: some crucial details in the story appear to be false.

UPDATE: Reader William G. Bean writes:

Regarding your recent post about deaths of civilians in Afghanistan, I was reminded of a story I read a few months ago about our military interdiction of gasoline supply trucks that were smuggling gasoline into the interior of Afghanistan. Our soldiers would stop the truck, remove the drivers, then have a helicopter blow up the truck. We would release the drivers unharmed. I think that is the way you judge our operations in this war. We put our soldiers at increased risk in this kind of operation and I don’t think any armed force has ever gone to such extremes to protect the civilian population.

Yes, I remember that story. It was reported in terms of the drivers’ complaints about how unfairly they were treated. Sadly, the more careful you are in war, the higher standard people hold you to.

CHRIS PATTEN MAY BE out of a job.

THE CDC is soliciting public comments on what it should do about smallpox vaccination. This link will take you to a page that has a link for comments, and some background information.

BELLESILES UPDATE: Just ran across this story in The Guardian on Bellesiles. And even The Guardian isn’t all that sympathetic to his story any more. And check out this quote:

“The evidence is utterly devastating,” said Albert Alschuler, a professor at the University of Chicago law school and author of a study favourable to advocates of firearms control. “We’re hesitant to use the word fraud in our business, but it seems to me that there are smoking guns all over the place.”

The article does, however, repeat the story that Bellesiles received many death threats. I wonder, though: So far I’ve seen no evidence of this other than Bellesiles’ by-now-unreliable statements. Did he go to the police about those at the time?

GO AIR FORCE!

TRAFFIC WARS: TAPPED has a new post on the subject.

BRENDAN O’NEILL responds to my Rall post below, and my mention of new, lower figures for civilian casualties, and issues a challenge: “Now, how about some of those who hide behind the numbers coming out as either being for the war, or against it?”

Okay. Here’s my response. I’m for the war. I’m glad that we killed a lot of Al Qaeda and Taliban. I’m sorry we didn’t kill them all. I’m sorry that we killed any non-Al Qaeda and non-Taliban Afghans, but it was a war, and that kind of thing happens. I don’t believe — with Mary Robinson — that you have a moral duty not to engage in war if anyone might be hurt as a result. In fact, I think that when you engage in war you have a moral duty to use sufficient force to end it swiftly, because that actually saves lives overall.

But Ted Rall claims that we were “carpet-bombing” Afghan cities, something pretty easily refuted by the (low) casualty figures I cited. Most everything Rall says is easily refuted. Which is what makes the glowing Time review of his book so pathetic.

In a weird sort of way, though, I see reason in O’Neill’s final point. I don’t believe that the war is an imperialistic venture by America to solve its internal problems — unless, you know, having crazed Arabs crashing loaded planes into skyscrapers counts as an “internal problem.” But if there’s something wrong with our war effort, it’s that it’s “ineffective.” In other words, we’re not bombing enough people to ensure that attacks like 9/11 won’t happen again.

I’d be happy to sit in isolationist splendor if I thought we could do it. (Of course, then people would complain about the U.S. not being “engaged,” and about its “ignoring world problems,” instead of complaining about “imperialism.”) But if we have to bomb a lot of people to make America safe from dangerous wackos, then so be it. “Kill Americans and you’re dead meat” still seems like a good operative principle to me. I’d rather see all the Islamofascists turn peaceful and become McDonald’s franchisees or whatever. But that’s not an option at the moment.

DID THE FBI LIE TO CONGRESS? Byron York says it looks like it may have.

ADVANTAGE — BLOGOSPHERE! Last week, The American Prowler had a piece entitled J. Edgar Mueller. Today, William Safire has a column entitled J. Edgar Mueller. Okay, they’re not really that similar, but it’s fun.

UPDATE: And Katie Granju has another example. But, you know, I’m not convinced that this kind of thing deserves any more than a cutesy “I said it first” with a wink. When you’re talking about an FBI director, the “J. Edgar ___” construction isn’t exactly on a par with the discovery of oxygen, after all. And once you note that somebody thinks that calling George Bush a “cowboy” is an insult, well, the piece kind of writes itself.

I’m constantly getting picked on for saying that people are too quick to claim theft of ideas. But, really, there aren’t that many new ideas out there. And I’m not that big about owning any ideas I may have anyway. My own feeling, frankly, is that if people write a column around an idea that they saw on InstaPundit, that’s not theft — that’s influence. Which is a good thing.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The more I think about it, the more I wonder. There are tens of thousands of blogs. If you’re a columnist, probably anything you write has already been said by some blogger somewhere. So what do you do? Never, ever read blogs, so you can assert that as a defense? That’s a bad thing — for columnists and for weblogs. I think we need a pretty high standard here. If it’s not outright word-for-word plagiarism, I don’t think it’s worthy of complaint.

ANOTHER UPDATE: And the column in question turns out to have been filed on Thursday — before the post that allegedly inspired it. People often think of the same things in response to the same stimuli, folks. As Alexander Lindey wrote: “Most parallels rest on the assumption that if two successive things are similar, the second one was copied from the first. This assumption disregards all the other possible causes of similarity.”

JIM PINKERTON takes on space enviro-wackos over at TechCentralStation.

YASMEEN GHAURI UPDATE: Reader Tucker Goodrich informs me that Yasmeen Ghauri and her (former) Imam father have been “ostracized” by the Canadian Muslim community because of her success.

Okay, it’s India all the way, then, based on the Ken Layne test. I stand corrected. Tim Blair, not too surprisingly, has identified a similar antiterrorism heuristic.

A KINDER, GENTLER HOWELL RAINES: Hmm. I wonder how much Andrew Sullivan’s campaign has to do with this?

BELLESILES UPDATE: In case you missed my post on it over the weekend (my logs suggest that most of you surf from work, you slackers — er, I mean, “you valuable employees dedicated to staying up on important news,” of course), check out this piece by David Skinner on the committee that awarded Michael Bellesiles the (formerly) prestigious Bancroft Prize.

LARRY MILLER writes about the Paris Israeli embassy fire. He’s skeptical about claims that it was an “accident.” He also wonders why it got so little attention:

But no one had it. Not CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, no one. Not the local eleven o’clock news. Nothing. No network, no cable. I even checked the NewsRadio station, but if TV didn’t have it, why would they? They didn’t. So I shrugged and went to sleep (not necessarily in that order), and when, the next morning, I was gently nuzzled from my reverie in the usual manner by noticing our dog had climbed up on the bed and placed his rectum less than an inch from my mouth, I shuddered and retched my way into the bathroom, lunged for the Listerine, and stumbled outside to grab the papers out of the sprinkler and check them. Nothing. No headlines, no columns. Nothing on page two or three or five or fifteen. Nothing on the op-ed. Not a whisper.

Of course, if Miller had read InstaPundit he would have found this early notice. But that’s all I had, because there just wasn’t much coverage.

DAWSON HAS MOVED! Following a trend, he’s got a new, Stacy-Tabb-designed site, and a new URL. Bookmark it.

JONATHAN ADLER correctly indicts the NRA for joining the Fair Weather Federalists. To be fair, the ACLU isn’t any better on federalism than the NRA. But that’s setting way too low a standard for a civil rights group that’s supposed to care about the Constitution.

For more background, see this CATO paper by Gene Healy, which Adler references.