LIBERAL OVERREACH: Daniel Drezner, who was giving good advice to Republicans last week, now has some advice for the Democrats, who probably won’t be smart enough to take it either.

JAMES LILEKS IS COMPLETELY RIGHT ABOUT PIZZA.

I’M TEMPTED TO START AN ANGLICAN-CLERGY RISIBILITY WATCH, but this item convinces me that I don’t have the time to do it justice:

A Church of England bishop has attacked “sentimental” Christmas card portrayals of the Nativity, saying that Jesus’s family were asylum seekers and the three Wise Men were part of an assassination plot.

He means a “Jewish assassination plot,” of course. Santa dead, the Three Wise Men assassins — what’s next from these guys? Mary Magdalen as a “transgressive performance artist?” Hell, that would make more sense.

UPDATE: William Sjostrom emails a link to a post that says I’m wrong to call this pronouncement “risible” and after reading it I think he’s right. He also has a link to the original letter, which gives a bit more context than the Telegraph story, which seems to have given it as PC-ish a spin as possible.

Sorry. I guess I was primed for risibility by various other things that have come out lately, which kept me from giving the good Bishop the benefit of the doubt. I stand corrected. [Shouldn’t you wait 8 years to post this correction? — Ed. No, that’s the old media way!]

ANOTHER UPDATE: Kathryn Jean Lopez has linked to Sjostrom, too. She says: “the Telegraph may have just been looking to make trouble (and I took the bait!).” Me, too.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader points out that the press release was revised today (see the upper left-hand corner), suggesting that just possibly the Telegraph wasn’t spinning as hard as it seems. Anybody got a copy of the original version?

CRIME IS UP! CRIME IS DOWN! CRIME IS SIDEWAYS? Iain Murray comments on the new FBI crime figures. Excerpt:

The really interesting news is in the regional variation. Crime grew in the West by 6%, with violent crime up 2%, murder up almost 8%, property crime up 6%, burglary up 6% and auto theft up an amazing 15%. These numbers wiped out the continuing decreases in crime in the Northeast and Midwest and the static rate in the South. The West coast is facing a real crime problem that the rest of the country is not.

Interesting. I wonder what could account for that?

UPDATE: Reader John Roney emails:

CA’s largest city, LA, has had a police force in disarray. Crime rates up. SF has the lowest rate of solving murders of any major city in the US. (Which was news to the police chief). Seattle had a PC police force that was not very effective, riots pushed out chief, new guy not much better. Oakland has had a record 100+ murders this year.

These are just the cities that I am familiar with. So it could be a case that a confluence of lousy police departments at some of the West’s largest cities is throwing the average off.

Hmm. I wonder. It’s not like all the big East Coast police forces are so great, but I suppose only DC counts as a true disaster.

UPDATE: Reader Ashby Beal deplores my prejudice against the District of Columbia and demands evidence that its police force is a disaster. Well, it was a disaster when I lived there. According to this 1997 article from The New Republic it was a disaster in 1997:

In the District of Columbia, where the violent crime rate is triple the national average, the fundamental processes of law enforcement have simply broken down. A properly functioning police system should clear homicide cases–that is, a suspect is arrested and indicted–at a rate of at least 75 percent. The homicide clearance rate in the District is at the moment hovering around the terrifyingly low level of 30 percent, which means that in 70 percent of killings, no one is ever indicted, much less convicted. No other major police department in America approaches this level of cataclysmic failure. Even the problem-plagued Los Angeles Police Department, which must cope with large-scale and chronic gang warfare, clears 54 percent of its homicides.

And the failure of the homicide branch is merely a part of the whole. With 663 officers per 100,000 residents, Washington has almost three times more cops than the national average. Despite this, its Metropolitan Police Department barely functions.

I haven’t seen any evidence of improvement. Am I missing something?

UPDATE: D.C. Reader Doug Jordan emails:

Oh, BTW, the DC police force, while not exactly crack, is not a disaster at the moment. The homicide clearance rate is awful, but given the amount of intramural drug violence that goes into the statistics, that is going to be hard to fix. The current police chief is media-savvy and shakes things up on occasion. And the force could give lessons to some third world nations in riot control after the past couple of years of globalization demonstrations.

THE RIAA SEEMS TO HAVE A PROBLEM WITH THE TRUTH: But this one is a doozy:

But the RIAA seems to be having a few problems with the facts itself.

Yesterday it issued a press release announcing a piracy bust in New York which unearthed 421 CD-R burners.

Only there weren’t 421 burners, but “the equivalent of 421 burners.”

In fact, there were just 156. How did the RIAA account for this discrepancy?

“There were only 156 actual burners, but some run at very high speeds: some as high as 40x. This is well above the average speed,” was the official line yesterday.

I guess that means that I own 70 cars. That’s because my car, with an alleged top speed of 140 miles per hour, is seventy times as fast as the first automobile, a steam-powered contraption that had a top speed of 2 miles per hour!

This is pathetic. The story also raises another question: why is the Secret Service — supposedly busy fighting terror, etc. — acting as hired thugs on behalf of the recording industry? Then again, the Secret Service isn’t covering itself with glory there, either.

CORPORATE OPPORTUNISM SABOTAGING OUR EFFORTS IN IRAN? Justin Katz thinks so.

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER, I GUESS: From the corrections page in today’s New York Times:

An article on Nov. 28, 1994, about the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke and his home in Sri Lanka misstated the surname of a University of Tennessee law professor who nominated the writer that year for the Nobel Peace Prize, for his humanist approach to technology. The professor is Glenn Harlan Reynolds, not Roberts. A reader recently brought the error to The Times’s attention.

Is this a record?

Thanks to reader Tucker Goodrich for noticing.

UPDATE: Reader Andy Freeman says this isn’t even close to a record:

In 1919, Goddard wrote a scientific article, “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,” describing a high-altitude rocket; this ground-breaking article was published in a Smithsonian report. Misunderstanding the article completely, the New York Times newspaper ridiculed Goddard in a Jan. 13, 1920, editorial, stating that space travel was impossible, and that Goddard “seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.” They stated that rocket thrust would not work in a vacuum, apparently believing that Newton’s Third Law (that every force has an equal and opposite reaction) was not valid in space. The NY Times did not print a retraction until 3 days before men landed on the moon (p. 43, July 17, 1969).

Oh, yeah. I had forgotten that one, even though it’s mentioned in one of my books. Well, as I said, better late than never.

VINTAGE GADGETS MUSEUM: Gizmodo has an item on the first Sony Walkman. I saw one of these shortly before they went on sale — I was working in a department store when they brought a demo around. I remember being blown away by the sound, and the concept of being able to wear a high-quality stereo. I still think that’s cool.

HOWARD KURTZ WRITES about how Big Media nearly missed the Trent Lott story, and why:

By Monday, with the mainstream press still largely snoozing, Web writers were leading the charge. Andrew Sullivan: “Either they get rid of Lott as majority leader or they should come out formally as a party that regrets desegregation and civil rights for African-Americans.” Joshua Micah Marshall: “The real question is why this incident is still being treated as no more than a minor embarrassment or a simple gaffe.” National Review Online’s David Frum: “What came out of his mouth was the most emphatic repudiation of desegregation to be heard from a national political figure since George Wallace’s first presidential campaign.” . . .

Now the press is digging into Lott’s history of opposing civil rights measures — a public record that was barely mentioned when he became majority leader six years ago. Time’s Karen Tumulty wrote that Lott told her in the early 1980s that he had helped prevent blacks from integrating his Ole Miss fraternity. Tumulty says she didn’t report it at the time because Lott was an obscure Mississippi congressman — who was trying to needle her Los Angeles Times boss (and future CNN chairman) Tom Johnson for also opposing integration at his own fraternity chapter.

Read the whole thing.

MICKEY KAUS and John Ellis have thoughts on the 2004 primaries.

The big winner so far is Al Gore. He reminds me a bit of a student we had at the Law School some years ago, from a large family of prominent lawyers, who flunked out. His reaction: relief. “Now they’ll quit pestering me to go into the family business, and I can do what I want,” he said.

UPDATE: John Scalzi’s comments on Gore are amusing:

Make no mistake, Gore would win the 2004 Democratic nomination, on the backs of hardcore Democrats who would pull the lever for him for the same reason legions of Star Wars geeks trudge joylessly to George Lucas’ latest betrayal of their trust: Because that’s what expected of them, and because if they didn’t, they’d be admitting that former investment of time and energy was a complete waste. Meanwhile, the rest of pool of the potential Democratic voters, who are not glumly enthralled by Democratic Jedi mind tricks, will get a look at Gore’s reheated visage and say: Screw this, let’s go catch The Matrix. . . .

Anyway, Gore’s better off where he is. Right now there’s still a sizable chunk of people who feel vaguely that the man got screwed out of a job; better to ride that wave of disassociated pity to a posh sinecure on the lecture circuit and a kingmaker perch in Democratic politics, than lose unambiguously and stink up the room like the second coming of Mike Dukakis.

Scalzi has some good observations on Trent Lott, and Andrew Sullivan’s “Pledge Week,” too.

UH OH. Looks like another dropped ball.