THE ONLY PAIN AT THE DENTIST’S was to my wallet. I’m always a bit disconcerted to be praised for flossing daily, though. I thought everyone did. Apparently not. Ick.

OFF TO THE DENTIST: No posts until later this morning. Meanwhile go visit Dawson, who has a lot of interesting stuff today. So does Martin Devon. And if you’re tired of dissing Steve Earle, go over to Samizdata where they’re happily dissing Bono instead.

WHY PEOPLE AREN’T AS DUMB AS POLITICIANS THINK: Read this first-hand reporting by Megan McArdle.

UPDATE: Maybe this explains it. And the Blogosphere, too!

CALLING 1997: Bruce Hill has a telephone conversation with his former self, who wasn’t expecting things to work out quite this way.

A VICIOUS CYCLE OF LEGISLATION: Here’s a paper by Tim Lynch on responses to terrorism that’s worth reading.

INTERESTING CYNTHIA MCKINNEY FUNDRAISING LETTER at JSPS. Is it genuine? He says it is.

COLLIN MAY ASKS “WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE” over Spanish unilateralism that will presumably inflame the entire Muslim world.

DID THE STATE DEPARTMENT HELP COVER UP A SAUDI SUICIDE BOMBING? Charles Johnson says it looks that way.

MATT WELCH IS DEFENDING STEVE EARLE, noting that “Earle frequently writes songs from the points of view of — wait for it — other people. Including people he doesn’t necessarily agree with.” Well, yes. I do that, too. (Marc Weisblott replies to Welch by comparing Steve Earle to Ice Cube and Tom Arnold).

But the reason I’m not buying Welch’s defense (which National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru echoes) is that the comments by Earle in stories on the subject suggest that he’s deliberately trying to provoke people.

If you decide to knock down a hornet’s nest to stir up some excitement, you can’t complain when you’re stung. But hey, at least he got Welch to come out of seclusion and blog a little.

What will really sting, though, are comments like this one from the story linked above:

But Martha Bayles, author of “Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music” and a literature professor at Claremont McKenna College in California, said Earle’s apparent identification with Lindh reflected “a psychological need to repeat the good old days of the radical 60s, just like Mom and Dad.”

“Never mind whether the cause makes any sense — the point is to march in the streets and get on TV. It sounds as if Earle is singing to this crowd,” Bayles said.

Ouch.

UPDATE: Porphyrogenitus says Welch is wrong. Going back to the story I quoted above, I note that some people who have actually heard the Earle song seem to interpret it the way that talk radio has:

A smattering of like-minded New Yorkers who heard an advance copy of the Lindh song said they were enthusiastic.

“Steve Earle is standing up against the new patriotism, the ‘You’re with us or you’re against us’ mentality,” said Joan Hirsch, manager of Revolution Bookstore, which stocks anti-war pamphlets and leftist literature.

“(The song) speaks of the U.S. demonization of anyone who would go against the traditional American way,” Hirsch said. “It’s important for people to come to the defense of artists who are speaking out.”

So far, I haven’t seen any reports of Steve Earle saying he was just getting into a character’s head, and not taking a political position. But perhaps he’ll write a sympathetic song about the thoughts and dreams of Tom DeLay next, and prove me wrong.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Norwegian blogger Vegard Valberg writes that Earle needs to dress up his anti-Americanism with more artistic pretension, the way the Europeans do. The Blogger Formerly Known as Sarge is also typically pithy:

Billy Joel accepted the Brass Booby on Earle’s behalf at his home in Zurich, Switzerland, where he has been living in exile since his deportation in 1989 following the release of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”. Although no hard figures exist, the National Association of Deported Has-Beens reports 236 musicians were deported last year for crappy political songs no one ever heard of.

Earle will also be in the running later this year in the “Best Use of a Gimmick That Never Works in Order to Jump Start a Dead Career” category. We wish him luck.

He’s a contender.

STILL ANOTHER UPDATE: Eric Olsen weighs in on Matt Welch’s side, more or less, with a long and detailed post.

I agree with Eric that I don’t necessarily care what Earle “really thinks.” Sure, you can write for a character who isn’t you (I’ve never been an alcoholic who got drunk every day on Everclear, but I wrote a song called “Waves of Grain” about one). But when you write a song that you advertise as a “statement,” then, well, people are going to call you on the statement you make. My guess is that Earle means it as a poke in the eye at people he doesn’t like more than as a statement of actual sympathy for the Taliban, who’d be hurling him from the tops of buildings pretty damn quick if they could. But it’s no great shock if the pokees poke back, is it?

It’s not like anyone’s censoring his song. It won’t get any less airplay than it would have anyway, which is to say next to none. It’ll probably get more. As for the criticism, well, he seems to welcome it. So what’s the beef?

STILL ANOTHER UPDATE: Jim Henley has the wrapup. He thinks I’m wrong.

Thought experiment: Just after the Jasper, Texas incident, Lee Greenwood releases a song sympathetically looking inside the mind of a guy who lynches some black people. Same analysis?

WE KEEP HEARING ABOUT HOW JOHN ASHCROFT IS THREATENING CIVIL LIBERTY, but here’s another case of censorship by a University against someone it doesn’t like. American University should be ashamed.

FIRST IT’S THE SAUL ZAENTZ / SAURON CONNECTION, now Dave Trowbridge has spotted Saruman in the Middle East.

HOUSTON MOON ROCK THEFT STING: This is pretty interesting. I was on Larry King talking about space property rights and moon rocks some years ago when a woman caller said that J. Paul Getty had had a moon rock in his house, which she had seen as a visitor. That, I later determined, was probably one of many plaster-of-paris fake moon rocks used for astronaut training and later given out as gifts.

This, however, involved an effort to steal the real thing. But the real tragedy is that moon rocks are still rare and valuable. If things had gone as they should have, they’d now be common enough not to tempt thieves.

BAD BLOOD: InstaPundit has been on the New York blood story since August 15, with updates both before and after 9/11. Now Douglass Starr has a lengthy piece in The New Republic on how things were mishandled by the Red Cross.

MOIRA REDMOND WONDERS why moviehouses are full of dysfunctional mothering lately.

Obviously, it’s a subtle plot by Richard Bennett.

ATHENA RUNNER IS TAKING A BREAK FROM BLOGGING in order to give birth.

As Daniel Taylor has already demonstrated, hospitals are woefully behind the times. We need a T1 beside every bed, to facilitate blogging by indisposed bloggers.

CHARLES OLIVER has several posts saying that people are being too hard on Steve Earle. Read the lyrics and see what you think.

I’m not convinced. And I think Oliver’s comparison with Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” is just plain wrong. The character in Cash’s song knows he’s done something evil, and that he’s paying for it, not being rewarded in Heaven.

JOHN FOGERTY WAS RIGHT, writes Eugene Volokh: Saul Zaentz really is the devil, or at least a near replica.

SAUDI CONSPIRATORS CAN TAKE ADVANTAGE OF VISA EXPRESS, but this British 9/11 widow faces deportation even though her children are American.

The INS: It’s everything you don’t want it to be.

MOUSSAOUI’S SAUDI FORMER ROOMMATE has pled guilty to charges of lying about his association with Moussaoui:

Al-Attas, born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to Yemeni parents, was Moussaoui’s friend and, briefly, his roommate in Norman, where Moussaoui had come to enroll at the nearby Airman Flight School.

Al-Attas, told U.S. District Judge Michael Mukasey that he lied to investigators in Minnesota on Aug. 18 and in Oklahoma on Sept. 11, especially about Moussaoui, whom he knew by an alias, Shaqil.

“When the agents asked if I (also) knew his real name, I lied and said I did not,” he said.

Al-Attas admitted he also lied about their plans to go to New York City in late August, 2001; knowledge of Moussaoui’s desire to participate in jihad; a planned trip to Pakistan to speak to religious scholars and “others who believe that our religion favors participation in jihad.”

He said he also tried to prevent law enforcement authorities from learning about some of Moussaoui’s classmates at an Oklahoma flight school.

Interesting. I wonder what he’s telling investigators now.

LINDH MAY DO ONLY TWELVE YEARS because of a screwup in calculating his sentence under federal guidelines, reports TalkLeft.

Oops.

CHRIS BERTRAM disses a Guardian columnist who says that not much has changed in Britain and America since 1977.

Yep. I’m typing this on an Altair 8080 in Electric Pencil. I’ll upload it to my BBS (new 1200 baud modem! it’s blazing fast!) where dozens of people will see it. Then I’m putting on my white suit and going dancing to the sounds of Evelyn Champagne King.

Where do they get these guys?

IN LIGHT OF MY EARLIER POST ON THE POSSE COMITATUS ACT and the use of the military for law enforcement, you might want to check out this book chapter by Dave Kopel on the deadly fruit of military participation in the Drug War.

UPDATE: If you’re too lazy, er busy, to read the whole chapter, Kopel has a nice post on this over at The Corner that neatly summarizes his point of view.

STEVE EARLE, YOU IDIOT: Porphyrogenitus writes:

If Anyone Still Thinks that no one on the Left identifies with every enemy of America, they ought to check out this story on singer-songwriter Steve Earle, and his new ode to Johnny bin Walker, Osama, and the Taliban, glorifying them as Christ-like figures.

It gets worse, as you’ll see if you follow the link and read the quotes from Earle. Earle’s a great musician and a great producer (listen to his work with Ray Kennedy on the V-Roy’s albums Just Add Ice and All About Town). But he’s basically a failure as a human being, with serious drug, booze and money problems. This looks to me like a pathetic bid for attention.

But, on the upside, all those Islamofascists probably hate being portrayed as “Christ-like.”

UPDATE: Hey, maybe Webb Wilder will write a song in response.

JUDGING BY HER PIECE IN LAST WEEK’S New Yorker, Katha Pollitt needs to read Down Olsen’s blog.

STEVEN CHAPMAN, who along with Jim Henley is filling the intelligent-critic-of-the-war niche that has been left so spectacularly vacant by the “Eric A. Blair” crowd, has an interesting debate going on about the importance of capturing Osama bin Laden.

I’m all for cutting off the snake’s head. But personally, I’ve long been skeptical that Osama is at the root of all this. I think he’s a tool. I think the Saudis are behind it, running a cold (and sometimes hot) war against us with cooperation from various other governments and groups in the region. I think this has been going on for a long time, and that considerable effort will be needed to shut it down.