STEVEN DEN BESTE has an interesting analysis of the Bush speech. He reads it pretty much as I do — but he’s longer, and clearer, than I was. He agrees with me that it’s about more than just the Palestinians.

JOE KATZMAN has some observations concerning Arafat’s likely strategy in the coming months.

I think that the United States’ strategy will be to let the Israelis run wild, while telling other Arab nations that this is what happens to people who take the wrong side in the terror war — and while pointing out that the Israelis are constrained in ways that the United States is not.

LILEKS IN CONGRESS! A reader just emailed that Rep. Tom Tancredo was reading from Lileks’ latest Screed on the House floor a few minutes ago.

CRAIG SCHAMP says the Chronicle has been wallowing in Nixon-era nostalgia while missing the true free speech-and-repression story right under its nose.

READER TRENT TELENKO notes this part of the speech, aimed at Syria:

“I’ve said in the past that nations are either with us or against us in the war on terror. To be counted on the side of peace, nations must act. Every leader actually committed to peace will end incitement to violence in official media, and publicly denounce homicide bombings. Every nation actually committed to peace will stop the flow of money, equipment and recruits to terrorist groups seeking the destruction of Israel — including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah. Every nation actually committed to peace must block the shipment of Iranian supplies to these groups, and oppose regimes that promote terror, like Iraq. ****And Syria must choose the right side in the war on terror by closing terrorist camps and expelling terrorist organizations.**** “

Yes, Bush is throwing down the gauntlet to a lot of folks in terms that they must surely understand. This presumably explains the sudden increase in cooperation we’ve seen in the last week or two.

UPDATE: Reader Dick Aubrey analyzes the speech:

When Bush was making his speech in the fall, laying out, among other things, what he expected the Taliban to do, I said to my wife (gleefully), “They can’t do it. They’re screwed. We win.” Which is to say there was no way the Taliban could even pretend to meet the requirements. The really good part is that in that case, and this, the requirements were eminently reasonable, desirable, and beyond quibble.

I love it.

THE BOSTON GLOBE’S OMBUDSMAN COMPLAINS that people can’t tell the difference between opinion pieces and news reports nowadays. I wonder why?

JOHN SCALZI ASKS “What do they teach them in schools these days?”

NOT SO WOBBLY NOW: Bush says become a Western-style democracy and then we’ll talk peace. And no more Arafat — we’re tired of that terrorism shit, dudes, and we’re not fooled.

This isn’t just an Israel / PLO thing, it’s a signal to some other people. (Look at the passage following the reference to “people of Muslim countries” in the text).

Reader S.E. Brenner says the BBC was so miffed it dropped the speech suddenly halfway through. “No dancing in the streets of Soho tonight.”

ERIC ALTERMAN — becoming a warblogger? Read this:

I am pleased to be able to fob the job of addressing the current US version of the problem on my friend Todd Gitlin, whose smart piece on anti-Semitism is in Mother Jones online. [NOTE: Gitlin opens with SFSU — GR]

Todd writes, “Wicked anti-Semitism is back. The worst crackpot notions that circulate through the violent Middle East are also roaming around America, and if that wasn’t bad enough, students are spreading the gibberish. Students! As if the bloc to which we have long looked for intelligent dissent has decided to junk any pretense of standards.” He has a great deal more faith in students than I do, however. . . .

Also, a brief digression to France: Why do so few people wish to notice that all this anti-Semitic violence in France is being carried out by Arabs? Doesn’t that make a difference? The French are no more or less anti-Semitic than they have always been. French anti-Semitism is not exactly news. Hello: Ever see “The Sorrow and the Pity?”

Eric, you are being assimilated into the blogosphere. Resistance is futile.

(The Gitlin piece, by the way, is excellent.)

A SAD FATHER’S DAY STORY regarding BET’s website and viewer email.

REBECCA BLOOD joins the crowd savaging the Los Angeles Times’ web registration process.

I don’t get it. They irritate a lot of people, ensure that their site is read and linked to less often, and get a lot of forms on which people lie about all the information they ask about anyway. How many of these registrants are named “Elmer Fudd” and list “” or something similar as their email address? A lot, I’ll bet. Then there are the more sophisticated folks, who just report that they’re 97 year-old Eskimo women with household incomes in excess of $250,000 per annum. . . .

UPDATE: Reader Lee Kane writes:

Regarding the LA Times required registration, I always make sure to put in the most wildly incorrect and mismatched data that I can when confronted with such “surveys”. (For example, I might say that I work as a clerk and make over 150K per year and live in Alaska. I was born in 1999, etc.)

What better way to force sites to stop the surveys than to make their data useless? The more people who engage in this fake data practice the more useless the data will become.

Yes, I expect that a lot of people do this, and I imagine their numbers are steadily growing.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Several readers wrote that “cypherpunk” works as both ID and password at the LA Times. I wonder how many other sites that’s true for. . . .

STILL ANOTHER UPDATE: Emily Jones writes:

I think a lot of the online papers have realized this and set up their registration so that you cannot log in until you check your e-mail and follow the link that they leave you. I’ve set up an account on Yahoo! specifically because of this. I only ever check it when I’m forced to register for a news site.

Inbox: 1

Bulkmail: 357

Every time.

Cheers,

Emily

SFSU UPDATE: Erin O’Connor is happy that the anti-semitic GUPS website is down, but unhappy that the University’s action in taking it down looks like censorship.

As I said earlier, I’d rather see them punished for their violent actions, which they appear to be. It’s a somewhat more complicated question whether taking down their website, hosted on the University server, is censorship, or at least censorship that violates the First Amendment. My own feeling is that campus speech codes are wrong, and they’re usually held unconstitutional. But when you’re an accredited student organization, and your site is hosted by the University, it’s arguably not just your speech, but theirs — at least enough that they can make you abide by a “no hate speech” rule for what’s there. And it gives them a colorable claim that they should be able to limit what you say on that site. That’s a distinct matter from punishing you for things you say elsewhere. (And it’s one reason why I don’t have InstaPundit on the University of Tennessee’s servers, where I could host it for free if I wanted. I don’t want any confusion about who’ in charge of this site.)

I believe in punishing actions, not speech, and that’s what was really called for with regard to GUPS. The website was more illustrative (as Glenn Frazier points out) of what GUPS was like than it was a problem in itself.

And that’s one reason why the University’s action is more troubling than it might otherwise be. While the website was up, it was obvious to the world what kind of a group this was. Now it’s not. Which coincidentally (?) makes life easier for the University as it faces charges of not being hard enough on the group for its actions.

UPDATE: Meryl Yourish has a post on this too.

LET THE FLAMEWARS BEGIN! Arnold Kling is weighing in on the “Version fatigue” debate, and he’s dissing Unix and Linux something fierce.

Send the hatemail to Kling, not me. I’ve already put in my two cents’ worth. One minor correction, though. Kling says that I don’t have the patience to study manuals. I do have the patience. After all, I’m a law professor who reads and writes thousand-footnote articles — it’s just that I’ve recognized that studying manuals is often wasted, since most of the knowledge contained in them will be obsolete with the next version. Not all software is that way — Sonic Foundry (which not coincidentally, keeps the same programmers working on the same things in successive versions) avoids that problem quite well. But more software should be like Sonic Foundry’s.

I do notice that the term “version fatigue” seems to be catching on. Cool.

I ASK, Ranting Screeds answers. With a Simpsons reference, no less.

LILEKS DISSES THE LA TIMES ANTIBLOGGER PIECE — without reading it! But that’s the point:

I hadn’t registered, so I couldn’t get the story. The LA Times required my name, address, phone number, AND my income level. All required fields. Click on the privacy policy, and of course it’s the usual thicket of prickly conditions, concluding with the assertion that the policy may change at any time, and continued use of the site will be construed as agreement to the policy, even if it’s changed since last I read it. In other words, they could change it tomorrow to allow for the LA Times to send my personal info to Gobsmacking Wombat Porn, Inc, which would send me a torrent of full-color come-ons, and I’d have nothing to say about it.

All to read some crummy story in a bloated paper? I learned more reading the commentary about it on other sites. Which were free. Which asked nothing. Which did what I want before I knew I wanted it, and which have built up so much good will I’d subscribe to each if the price was right. And if any of the people who ran these sites asked for my phone number because they wanted to talk about something, I’d tell them.

Never trust a company that calls you a guest. Trust the ones who know you’re a customer and call you just that. Or treat you like a customer on the small chance you may be one some day.

Truth. (Yeah, I know there’s another link to Lileks below — but that’s to a Screed. This is a Bleat.)

H.D. MILLER has been cruising Islamist websites, reading about the “martyrs” of Afghanistan, and has some thoughts:

What makes Suraqah’s death count for anything more than the flowery rhetoric that was expended in describing it?

Beyond offering first aid, there’s no hint that his actions were ever especially heroic. He didn’t fling himself on a grenade, or charge a machinegun nest full of Special Forces troops, or hold off a battalion of Rangers. There’s no indication that his actions prolonged the Islamic theocracy of Afghanistan one minute, or delayed the establishment of a secular Afghan republic one second. The sequence of events is this: an American pilot, flying at 25,000 feet, with little risk to himself and his machine, punched a button, and Suraqah al-Andalusi was blown in half. Then the pilot flew back to the U.S.S. John F. Kennedy in time to have a bowl of Cap’n Crunch and catch the Steelers game on satellite television.

That’s how it was, and that’s exactly the way it should be.

As sorry as I am for Suraqah al-Andalusi’s widow and two children, I have to say that I’m glad his death was as impersonal and as sudden as it was. The only way I’d be happier if we could have arranged it so a minor Pentagon functionary could punch a big red button that activated a death ray on the same satallite that broadcast the NFL; a death ray that would have instantly vaporized Suraqah al-Andalusi, leaving behind a pile of ashes and a semi-molten AK-47.

We need to make the death of every terrorist and every terrorist supporter as impersonal, as inconsequential, and as unheroic as possible. Make all jihadi martyrdoms as pointless and as inevitable as Suraqah al-Andalusi’s. Take away the glamour and the heroism and the mysticism, and leave the corpse and a deep and abiding sense of hopelessness. For us it should be like the extermination of vermin, the stomping of a roach. And for them, they should made to know that the reaper is coming; they should be made to fear the shadow seconds before the darkness.

Miller was inspired to these thoughts by the viewing of the Daniel Pearl murder tape — which can be chalked up as of a piece with most everything else those guys do: brutal, evil, and ultimately ineffective. They deserve to die ingloriously, and they will, and we should rub the noses of their supporters in this fact mercilessly.

MALAISE? A while back, Steven Chapman noted a certain lassitude around the Blogosphere. Now Andrew Sullivan is saying more or less the same thing, only with regard to society at large.

Well, there’s less happening on a day-to-day basis than there was in the fall, which translates into less adrenaline and more cortisol, I suppose. My guess is that things will pick up again soon enough. Instead of worrying about the current pace of events, I’d advise taking advantage of it. It’s not likely to last.

ROSS SILVERMAN BLOGS an interesting item regarding smallpox vaccinations.

ADD THIS TO YOUR WORRY LIST: Mike Silverman has a potential terrorist target: the upcoming Gay Pride parades.

Pride parades in large cities (NY, SF, etc) usually draw half a million to a million participants and spectators, and security is usually very light, limited to police who engage in traffic and crowd control. Given the massed number of people, I really hope parade organizers in the big cities are extra-vigilant with security this year. In the past I have worried about attacks from militia types and other right-wing loons, but the masses of people at a parade must be attractive to Islamic terrorists as well.

Hmm. Sadly, this makes sense to me.

STILL MORE EVIDENCE that Mars was once warm and wet:

“Imagine more than five times the volume of water in the Great Lakes being released in a single flood, and you’ll have a sense of the scale of this event,” said Ross Irwin, a geologist in the museum’s Center for Earth and Planetary Studies (CEPS) and the paper’s lead author.

How much of that water still remains locked in the martian soil is unclear, but this is certainly a positive sign: at least we know that the water was there at one point.

WELL, it’s easy to find the most admirable crew in this quote from a Washington Post article on racial troubles at a Maryland high school:

“The cheerleaders hang with the cheerleaders, the jocks with the jocks, the bangers with the bangers, the blacks with the blacks, and the Indians go to class,” said Tristen Bryant, an African American. “You stay with your race. That’s where you feel comfortable.”

Jeez. Maybe if more students were going to class there’d be less time for ethnic tensions.

BRENDAN O’NEILL hates human rights, as well as the antiwar movement, environmentalism, multiculturalism, and anticapitalism. But he’s a lefty!

A CAREFUL CONTENT ANALYSIS OF AL QAEDA THREATS has convinced Tim Blair that the organization is on the ropes.

UPDATE: On a more serious note, Jay Caruso points out a contradiction, and steers us to this article suggesting that Al Qaeda really is on the ropes, but that the publicity it’s getting will inspire copycats who will inflate its apparent importance.

CHARLES COLSON writes about the threat of Islamofascist recruitment in prisons. He’s right that it’s an issue, but his solution — which seems basically that Christianity is better — doesn’t fly.

First, it’s got First Amendment problems. Under current Supreme Court law you could probably get rid of all prison ministries if you chose, but you can’t favor one religion over another. Second, his view of Christianity in prison is a bit rosy-eyed: Christian Identity types have been recruiting there for years.

Finally, one way to reduce this threat would be to stop putting people in prison for short, revolving-door sentences. If people aren’t going to get out of prison until they’re 70, I don’t care who recruits ’em. And if they’re not in prison at all, they’re not subject to prison recruiting.

What has produced such a large and vulnerable population for Islamists to exploit is the locking up of lots of people for nonviolent drug crimes. Get rid of them, and keep the people guilty of real crimes like rape, robbery and murder in there for a long time, and you’ll solve this problem. And a lot of others. And without violating the First Amendment.

JAMES LILEKS needs a position in higher education, as this piece proves. Perhaps he could be President of SFSU — there may be a vacancy there soon.