REQUIRING WEBSITE REGISTRATION costs a newspaper dearly. As I wrote a while back, if you want impact and credit, you have to think about these things.

MORE REPORTAGE from antiwar protests.

SALAM PAX has a lot of nice photos from Baghdad on his site.

SHANTI MANGALA has moved. Adjust your bookmarks accordingly.

IT’S A BATTLE OF THE FICTIONAL POLS! Fred Thompson wants to run against Josiah Bartlett. Well, sort of.

THE RUSH TO WAR: Michael Ramirez nails it.

THE RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH has a very unfavorable editorial regarding John Lott.

UPDATE: Prof. Dan Polsby emails:

“Nevertheless, [wrote the Times-Dispatch] serious supporters of gun ownership would be wise not to cite Lott’s work in the future.”

Good luck! Numerous of Lott’s opponents (John Donohue, Ian Ayres, Phil Cook, Jens Ludwig, and many others) use the Lott-Mustard numbers, subsequently updated by Lott, in their work because they have to; there is nothing else out there.

Cast your mind back to what things were like pre-1997. Remember that (in retrospect hilarious) study by David McDowell and collaborators, that the New York Times made so much of, that looked at murder rates in five (!) counties for a few years? Stuff like that could be done (and touted in the newspapers as “science”) because nobody had the sitzfleisch to clean up the boxes and boxes of panel data, that were just sitting there waiting to be analyzed, until Lott and Mustard did it — and shared it, freely and immediately, with the whole world. Now there is a minor industry of free riders dining out on that work. There’s just plain no chance that it wouldn’t be cited in the future, no matter how how ludicrous Lott’s displays of personal vanity might be.

Good point.

STEVEN DEN BESTE on the reasons for war from an expert:

The second front was about the long-term eradication of the root causes of Al-Qaeda-type terrorism. All the terrorist-wallahs and Arabists the Bush administration tapped said the same thing: the reason educated Arabs sign up with bin Laden is a lack of democracy in their homelands. The antidote: open up the Arab world.

What’s funny is that the Bush Administration has endorsed “root causes” — but in a serious way. “Root causes” was supposed to be a slogan that would justify not acting, not a rationale for action. Dumb cowboys — don’t they understand anything?

MICHELE at A Small Victory is sending CDs to American soldiers and wouldn’t mind some help.

SO ARE THE FRENCH COMING TO THEIR SENSES?

The UMP’s president, Alain Juppe, the party’s parliamentary head, Jacques Barrot, and Edouard Balladur, the head of parliament’s foreign affairs commission, have also all warned that a veto risks a complete breakdown in relations with the United States and some European countries.

France has “avoided committing a mistake, which some are pushing for, that would have left it isolated: wrongly brandishing its right of veto,” Juppe told a debate on the Iraq crisis in parliament on Wednesday.

“A veto is unimaginable,” Claude Goasguen, another UMP lawmaker, told the daily Le Monde in its Thursday edition. “We are not going to break the United Nations and Europe just to save a tyrant,” he said, referring to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Or has France just cut a deal to get Russia or China to cast the veto and take the heat?

NOBEL LAUREATE URGES EUROPE TO CONFRONT SADDAM: It’s Elie Weisel.

“I believe it is the moral duty to intervene when evil has power and uses it,” Wiesel said.

“If Europe were to apply as much pressure on Saddam Hussein as (it) does on the United States and Britain, I think we could prevent war,” he said.

Yes, but Europe is more horrified by U.S. and British power than by Saddam’s.

ERIC ALTERMAN won’t miss Donahue, whose show he calls “crappy.”

THE DOG THAT DIDN’T BARK: Zach Barbera points to this Asia Times article entitled “Arabs Wash Their Hands of Saddam” and notes this passage:

Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrullah openly regretted that in “the greatest Muslim demonstration, the reunion of 2 million Muslims in Mecca”, there were no calls against war.

Two million Muslims, the most religious of the bunch, get together in Mecca and there aren’t any “calls against war.”

Fascinating.

UPDATE: On the other hand, there’s this.

WHEN DIGICAMS ATTACK: Love the title.

WALTER OLSON is profiled in an interesting article. Via email, however, I learn that Olson has a minivan, not an SUV as the article states.

HUMAN SHIELDS, ICY ROADS, CLONING AND BUFFY: It’s another issue of Virginia Postrel Magazine.

Also, she has this fascinating article on “Neuroeconomics” in The New York Times. If it interests you, I recommend Robert Frank’s Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions, which I think is far and away Frank’s best book, though hardly his most famous.

I GAVE BLOOD at the law school blood drive right before my Constitutional Law class. I’m not sure how good an idea that was. Giving blood never makes me dizzy or faint, but I was just a touch lightheaded — it was sort of like having downed a shot right before class. For all I know, it was an improvement. . . .

Aside from my secretary (who had donated just before me, and who kindly snapped this picture) and one male student, the crowd donating and waiting was entirely female. I don’t know if that’s representative or not, but it seems as if every time I donate on campus it’s that way.

Anyhow, there’s apparently a non-trivial blood shortage in most of the nation, and even those places with plenty on hand are having to send some of theirs elsewhere to make up the difference.

Part of the reason may be (as I blogged here and here back when InstaPundit was young) that they’re getting more and more picky about who they’ll take blood from. In particular, they seem extraordinarily worried about mad cow disease, with ever-more-stringent limits on blood donation by people who have spent time in the UK. Perhaps the reasons for that are better than I realize (which is a bit worrisome, if so), but I wonder how many lives it’s saving, versus lives potentially lost because of blood shortages. Has anyone looked into that lately?

In the meantime, I guess the rest of us in the ever-dwindling group of approved donors should roll up our sleeves. It’s virtually painless, and no big deal. Plus, I got a free cookie!

NATHAN NEWMAN has discovered something rather A.N.S.W.E.R.-like in the affirmative action protest organization. He has lots of links, too.

I SUSPECT THAT THIS JONAH GOLDBERG PIECE on McCarthyism will generate a lot of, er, discussion.

Kevin Drum has already responded.

UPDATE: Apparently, by linking this piece I’ve produced a flood of hatemail to Jonah Goldberg. I guess more of my readers are civil libertarian types.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Steve Verdon says that now Kevin Drum is subjecting me to neo-McCarthyism. Or something like that.

There are also replies up from Silent Running and Arthur Silber.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I read Kevin Drum’s post again and — though it really didn’t register with me the first time — I think it is kind of a cheap shot.

But I want to be clear where I stand here. I don’t hold any brief for McCarthy. He was a buffoon and a thug. But if McCarthyism was bad, it was because he accused innocent people, not because he pursued Communists. Communists were — and are — comparable to Nazis. Being one is as bad as being a Nazi. Supporting Communism is as bad as supporting Nazism. And calling Communists Communists isn’t McCarthyism — as Kevin Drum himself agrees.

And if you disagree, and think that Communists aren’t as bad as Nazis, well, that’s your opinion. But don’t expect me to be impressed, or to think that you hold any sort of moral high ground. So what part of my position is different from this passage in Kevin’s post?

I can’t pretend to speak for the entire liberal community, and certainly not for liberals of a generation before me, but I’m not sure anyone really denies that there were indeed communist spies in the United States back in the 50s. The problem with McCarthy — and McCarthyism — wasn’t that he uncovered lots of communist spies, but that he didn’t uncover many communist spies. While other, more careful investigators had some success, McCarthy himself was extraordinarily unproductive.

What McCarthy did do was accuse everyone under the sun of being a communist. If you had belonged to the communist party as a student in the 30s, you were a communist. If you belonged to the ACLU, you were a communist. If, like Fred Fischer, you belonged to the Lawyer’s Guild for a few months after you graduated from law school, you were tarred as a communist on national TV.

It’s not McCarthyism to accuse a communist of being a communist. It is McCarthyism to accuse someone of being a communist who has only a vague association with communist friends, groups, or ideas.

As I said in this post about A.N.S.W.E.R. that Kevin links disapprovingly:

It’s not McCarthyism to call people who are communists, communists. Communists, as devoted followers of murderous totalitarianism, deserve to be called to account every bit as much as their Nazi colleagues. And in the 21st century, they can hardly pretend to be ignorant of their ideology’s true nature.

Sounds to me like Kevin and I are on the same page — except that, somehow, he’s accusing me of McCarthyism. I guess it’s not McCarthyism to accurately charge 1950s Communists with Communism. It’s just McCarthyism to accurately charge 2003 Communists, like A.N.S.W.E.R., with Communism. That doesn’t make much sense to me.

SADDAM HUSSEIN: Media lord!

THERE’S MORE ON LOS ALAMOS SECURITY (OR THE LACK THEREOF) over at DefenseTech.

I SHOULD HAVE LINKED TO THE DIXIE FLATLINE BLOG before, but I kept forgetting to. But I think you’ll like it. Here’s an excerpt from his close reading of the G.I. Joe cartoon show:

This base, as befits America’s premier, top-secret military force, is amazing, and has a truly gigantic laser cannon mounted in the center of the main building. Extremely impressive, the cannon must be at least two hundred meters long, and can only move on a vertical axis. This illustrates one of the greatest problems with the Joe force. Formed and equipped under Reagan, it never wanted for funds, and accordingly it never had to be cost effective. Rather than use or modify existing weapons platforms and systems, the Joes were forever relying on custom designs, often introducing next-generation systems that, while quite novel and impressive, never quite justified the cost.

This Super Cannon is an excellent example of this problem. No other military organization in the world, then or now, has the ability to make a laser cannon that, to judge by its size, was capable of vaporizing entire city blocks. The Joes could, because money was truly no object, and the prestige of working in Joe R&D attracted the finest creative minds in the military world. But rather than place the weapon in a traversing mount, they chose a static position. All Cobra would need to do is move likely targets out of the Super-Cannon’s firing line. Perhaps there were technical limitations of which we are unaware that required the static position, but on the face of it, it seems a terrible design decision.

There’s more in a similar vein.

CONDI RICE AS A CANDIDATE FOR GOVERNOR in California? Interesting.

PROTESTERS WITH BLOODY HANDS:

The demonstrations are thereby making war more — not less — likely.

All this should be no great surprise, considering the ignominious history of peace protests over the last century. The record is fairly clear: When the demands of protesters have been met, more bloodshed has resulted; when strong leaders have resisted the lure of appeasement, peace has usually broken out.

If you want peace too much, or too visibly, prepare for war.

HERE’S AN ARTICLE ON LAW-BLOGGING from the ABA Journal. Howard Bashman is prominently featured, with a picture. Funny, he looks nothing like I’d imagined.