JASON RUBINSTEIN writes about his experiences with the music industry. They care a lot about protecting the rights of artists.

UPDATE: And here’s more on the subject.

WANT MORE DISCUSSION ON WHETHER TO INVADE IRAQ? Reid Stott has you covered.

I BLOG BECAUSE I CARE: Eugene Volokh says the Volokh Conspiracy doesn’t blog much on weekends because, er, my stats are a lot lower on weekends. By this, I feel sure, he means that overall blog readership is down — which is undoubtedly true. But is that a reason not to blog? Not at InstaPundit!

WHAT MARY ROBINSON IS UP TO: No good, as you might expect. Innocents Abroad has the scoop.

HMM. HARVEY PITT seems to be the Norm Mineta of securities regulation.

Hey, Harvey: Got that raise yet?

RICHARD BENNETT REPORTS that “the CIA sees blogware as an important defense technology.”

Well, yeah.

THE BLOGCRITICS ROLLOUT is scheduled for tomorrow. Follow the link for more information.

JOANNE JACOBS (whose permalink isn’t working, so you’ll have to scroll down) wants to know where the evidence is on Steven Hatfill. Good question. There’s some circumstantial evidence here and there, but there’s obviously not very much or he’d have been arrested. But there’s a steady flow of news stories that more or less convict him. Is he guilty or innocent? I don’t know. But perhaps he should go have a beer with Richard Jewell and Wen Ho Lee.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

It’s just amazing how it’s gone completely down the memory hole that one of the 9/11 hijackers turned up at a Florida ER with the loathsome pustulence of skin anthrax. Everyone’s so eager to find that the guy behind the bugs is an angry white male from Hollywood central casting that mere facts just go poof.

Indeed. I don’t remember the ER story, but I remember quite a few stories indicating that some of the hijackers, including Mohammed Atta, had signs of anthrax infection.

THE ECONOMIST says that the gap between Europe and America is widening. And that’s without reading Megan McArdle’s response to Adrian Hamilton’s “Invade America” piece.

What’s conspicuously missing is any evidence that Europe is undergoing the kind of soul-searching it has counseled for the United States. Shouldn’t Europeans be wondering why Americans have such a negative reaction to their statements and positions?

COMBUSTIBLE BOY is putting together a pro-war site for liberals and is soliciting suggestions for what materials he should include.

Diane E., meanwhile, having attempted dialogue with the warblogger-watch crowd, says they’re beyond reason. I don’t think they’re CB’s target audience, though.

MEG HOURIHAN says that bloggers should be paid. I agree. The tipjar’s there on the left. . . .

ANONYMOUS BLOGGING: My reference to Steven Den Beste’s piece on anonymous blogging has generated some email from other anonymous (or pseudonymous) bloggers. Half-Bakered writes:

My reason for anonymity is simple: fear. My blog is akin to SmarterTimes.com and others that go after bias and misrepresentation in the local paper. I do this for the Memphis Commercial Appeal and the Memphis Flyer. While I have no illusions of being on their level, I take my self-appointed job seriously and I do aspire.

Nor am I under any delusions that the CA has noticed me or my little blog. Not yet, anyway. But I worry about the day when they do.

The paper has treated some critics dismissively, letting columnists swipe at them. But they may also treat me as they did Heidi Schafer or Duncan Ragsdale–two people who spearheaded citizen campaigns against using public funds to back a basketball arena, a proposal that the CA backed whole-heartedly. The CA went after those two mercilessly and relentlessly, in Ms. Schafer’s case going so far as to print her home address and explore her personal life.

I have made my mistakes in life and couldn’t survive such public scrutiny. But I don’t think that disqualifies my observations and opinions. It does mean that if they decide to ‘do something’ about me, I have ample weaknesses to exploit.

And that scares me, frankly. Which is why I’m anonymous. Were circumstances otherwise, I’d proudly put my name to Half-Bakered, believe me.

Fair enough — though no doubt a more public criticism would have more effect. The Comedian writes about the distinction between pseudonymous and anonymous blogging. (In a curious coincidence, the post below this one involves his efforts to find the true identity of investor-babe Elsie Lee, who may or may not be pseudonymous.) Porphyrogenitus has a reply — linked to a bio — too. And Demosthenes has a long response to Den Beste, which was picked up by TAPPED, though (in a move that some bloggers seem to regard as improper), TAPPED links to the response but not to the post that occasioned it. I think that’s okay, but I assume that people know how to follow links.

UPDATE: Hesiod Theogeny adds this observation: “I think this discussion is an intellectually dishonest one, because most “le[f]t-wing” bloggers just happen to be pseudonymous.” But — and I’m not being snarky here, I really want to know — why is this? I mean, there are right-wing pseudonybloggers (like Robert Musil.) But I think he’s right that there are a lot more pseudonymous lefties. That seems odd to me, because it’s not as if the lefties are in danger of having the Gestapo show up at their door. (A few melodramatically claim otherwise, but that’s just for atmosphere.) And Jeff Goldstein, an untenured professor of the humanities, is a right-blogger who probably ought to be pseudonymous, but isn’t. So what gives?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Moxie weighs in, and points out that not every blogger is a “warblogger.” Good point.

BEST OF THE WEB (scroll down) says that Josh Marshall shouldn’t be complaining about the Washington Post’s use of the name “Talking Points Memo” for a new web feature, because Bill O’Reilly has used it on his show for a few years.

Yeah, but while the term “Talking Points Memo” predates both Marshall and O’Reilly (quaintly, it was once actually used to refer to actual memos containing talking points), Marshall has used it in the context of a web-based political site for quite some time, and it’s certainly become identified with his particular product. As a matter of trademark law, that may be enough for Marshall to win.

But regardless of the law (and I’m not a trademark lawyer) what the Washington Post did was downright sleazy, and they deserve to suffer the sanction of social opprobrium. Visit Marshall’s long-established weblog (it’s even older than InstaPundit!) for his side.

UPDATE: Several readers have written to ask how I can reconcile my “opposition to intellectual property” with my position here. Oh, please. I’m not opposed to intellectual property — just to the misuse of intellectual property laws to protect industry structure from technological change. That’s hardly what’s going on here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Will Vehrs tried to ask about this during Howard Kurtz’s online chat today, but for some reason they didn’t take his question.

READER GARY PULSINELLI forwards this link to a story in the Washington Post about authorities cracking down on “small scams” that may be sending money to terrorists, and adds these comments:

First, it shows that Customs is doing something in the war on terror, and it seems to have caught on to something subtle but important. It also shows that, while the agency was concerned with accusations of “profiling,” it didn’t let that stop the operation. And as an added bonus, it’s diverting funds from the war on drugs! As big a failure as that war is overall, parts of it can work effectively, and I suspect this may be one of them. However, I think the most interesting is

the tone of the coverage. The Post seems to have no problem with this type of investigation. Beyond the obligatory quote from CAIR (and even that quote seems selected to appear faintly ridiculous), the article focuses on how effective the method has been and the large numbers of Middle Easterners who were actually caught doing something wrong.

You don’t have to work all that hard to find a CAIR quote that sounds at least faintly ridiculous. But I do think that CAIR has squandered its credibility. I hope that this is working as well as the story makes it sound.

DONALD SENSING IS BOLDLY PREDICTING no attack on Iraq until next year. I wonder how much of his analysis applies to other potential targets.

MINETA UPDATE: Hesiod Theogeny points out some more damning information on air security.

It’s not that Homeland Security (chiefly embodied in air security at the moment) is intrusive. And it’s not that it’s ineffective. It’s that it’s both at the same time, that everybody knows that, and that the bureaucracy persists in making it worse anyway that is generating the anger. And there’s a lot of it out there.

BILL MAULDIN IS IN A BAD WAY. He’s 80, suffered some serious burns, and is now in a nursing home. The thing that cheers him up the most, according to this report from Bob Greene, is hearing from World War II veterans. If you’re someone who falls into that category, Greene tells you how to get in touch.

(Thanks to Dan Perkins for the headsup).

STEVEN DEN BESTE is rather critical of anonymous bloggers. Personally, I’m not opposed to anonymous blogging, but I admit that I am quicker to accept representations by real people, with preexisting reputations. Sure, anonymity can play an important role in protecting people’s ability to speak out. But it comes with a price, as Den Beste points out: “He is standing up to be counted, but he’s wearing a bag over his head.”

Anonybloggers have their role, and they can be quite good. And it’s fun to speculate about who they are: Is Atrios really Bob Shrum? Is Robert Musil really Alan Greenspan? (Almost certainly not, in both cases, but the fun doesn’t end there. Which anonybloggers are sock puppets for the opposition, designed to discredit the very positions they propound? I have my suspicions. . . . But I digress.)

If you want to blog anonymously, fine. That’s your privilege. Responding to your anonymity differently than they would respond to your True Name is other people’s privilege. You pays your money, and you takes your choice.

WHAT YOU MISSED: If you weren’t reading InstaPundit over the weekend (and my counter suggests that most of you surf from work) you may have missed the “Impeach Norm Mineta” bumper stickers and the story of how the Washington Post has sleazily appropriated Josh Marshall’s blog title for a similar feature of its own.

Unlike yours truly, Josh isn’t a law professor who could turn suing Big Media organizations into a lucrative hobby, so any copyright and trademark lawyers out there who are interested in helping him out should pop on over to his site and drop him an email. There must be a few of you with a strong sense of justice, or a grudge against the Post,.

TED TURNER LAND GRAB UPDATE: WyethWire reports that Turner is planting favorable articles in the South Carolina press, in response to the bad publicity he’s gotten over his effort to seize land belonging to the descendants of slaves.

It’s gonna take more than that, Ted.

READER TRENT TELENKO takes exception to the Ralph Peters article that I link to below, and offers this competing analysis:

Thanks to demographic changes, the Saudis can no longer credibly threaten Western economies with an oil embargo. The real Saudi oil weapon amounts to a scene from the Mel Brooks movie “Blazing Saddles.” They are playing the part of the black sheriff who faces down a lynch mob trying to kill him by putting a gun to his own head and saying “Stop right there, or I shoot the Nigger.” The Saudis are counting on the fact that anyone replacing them will be worse than they are and thus the outside world needs the Al-Saud clan in charge of the Arabian oil fields.

The Bush policy initiatives with Russia, its plans to invade and overthrow Saddam, and encouragement of the Iranian resistance amount to a plan to eliminate the Saudi oil weapon. If the Iraqi oil fields are fully operational and in the hands of American oil companies, the Iranian state is in the hands of a rational non-mullah western aligned regime and Russia is maximizing its oil production. The Saudi oil weapon is eliminated.

At that point, all it will take to over throw the Saudis is to remove our troops rom Saudi bases and state publicly that the fate of the Al-Saud clan is irrelevant to US interests. The lack of foreign hard currency from crashed oil prices means that the Saudi princes cannot buy off the Wahhabi masses and they will get eaten.

After the Wahhabi revolution and subsequent American blockade, the Western Europeans and 3rd worlders will be screaming for an American occupation of Saudi oil fields.

This is an interesting analysis. It is, of course, inconsistent with what we’re hearing from the White House, but that hardly proves that it’s not true.

RUSS SMITH WRITES that things aren’t back to normal in New York, and he’s kind of tired of people elsewhere (he singles out California) telling him to get over it.

MICKEY KAUS wonders why Doris Kearns Goodwin isn’t toast after a recent Los Angeles Times story that, he says, includes some seriously incriminating nuggets in a froth of Goodwin-friendly generality.

I don’t know. It was always hard for me to get excited about the various plagiarism scandals that ruffled the ether earlier this year, and as we move closer to a shooting war against a country somewhat more formidable than Afghanistan these things seem less pressing. But to other people it was a big deal once. I don’t know why it isn’t now.