EUGENE VOLOKH is deeply disappointed.

ARE EFFORTS TO REDUCE GUN VIOLENCE RACIST? Follow the link and decide for yourself.

UPDATE: Armed Liberal emails that I should include this link, too.

VIRGINIA POSTREL has posted a full account of her Lasik eye surgery, some good advice for U.S. Embassy staffers abroad, and some comments on anti-semitism in the Davos protests:

(At least they equate Jews with apes rather than rats, taking the Islamofascist line rather than the Nazi one.) It’s also inevitable. Opposing Jews and opposing trade, opposing trade and opposing America, opposing Jews and opposing America–it all goes together. I do have one question: Do these people think Donald Rumsfeld is Jewish? My guess is yes.

Well, those people are confused about a lot of things. . . .

UPDATE: Here’s more from Gotham.

SPEAKING OF PEOPLE BACK FROM HIATUS: The UnaBlogger is back! (Er, and he’s been gone long enough that if you’re new to the Blogosphere, I should note that whether this counts as “safe for work” depends on where you work. To me, it’s just cute cheesecake. If you think your boss is less progressive than me, well, be warned.)

JIM TREACHER IS MAKING A DIFFERENCE. Hey, I’m just glad he’s back.

ATRIOS seems to think that I write a column for the Washington Times, and derive great income thereby. If so, it’s escaped my attention. (Especially the “great income” part.) I think the only thing I ever wrote for the Wash. Times was a piece entitled “Greasing the Skids at the Start of Death Row,” condemning the Habeas Corpus provision of the 1996 antiterrorism bill, which oped I coauthored with GWU professor Bob Cottrol and which was placed there through the efforts of that noted Moonie front group, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

What you’re seeing is desperation in the face of the A.N.S.W.E.R. debacle. (Atrios’ post tries to compare writing for the Washington Times with standing alongside anti-semites and Stalinists.) And it’s well-founded desperation. Or such sloppiness that he thinks my book reviews for the Washington Post were actually in the Times. (Or maybe it’s just trolling. . . .)

And have you ever noticed how it’s okay to show religious prejudice against Moonies, but not against fanatical Muslims? Nothing political there. Jeez.

UPDATE: TalkLeft is offering me a free membership in the NACDL. Dare I accept, in this era of creeping McCarthyism?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Mark Kleiman thinks I’m entitled to a retraction, but thinks that my point about religious bigotry is weak.

HEY, I THINK I GET HATE MAIL FROM THIS GUY, TOO. If I replied to it, I hope I’d reply in the same vein.

HEARTENING NEWS: “Members of the British Muslim community are among those calling the loudest for Abu Hamza — the radical Islamist preacher whose mosque was raided yesterday by London police — to leave the country.”

AFRICANS ARE PROTESTING French unilateralism and neo-colonialism.

IF THIS IS THE A.N.S.W.E.R., says Mike Silverman, it must have been a pretty dumb question. Heh.

THIS ABC NEWS REPORT IS NOTHING WE DIDN’T KNOW, but it’s nice that it’s being reported:

Two related California studies to be released this week conclude it is currently impractical to catalog the ballistic “fingerprints” of every firearm in the state.

Recording every firearm made and sold in the nation’s most populous state could be overwhelming, according to an internal California Department of Justice report obtained last fall by The Associated Press. . . .

Given the miserable failure of Canada’s gun registry, it’s no real surprise that a California bullet registry would be, well, a miserable failure.

SCRAPPLEFACE DOES IT AGAIN: France Warns Iraq Against Acting Alone:

“Unilateralism is bad,” said Mr. deVillepin. “We urge Iraq to work in a multilateral way, through the U.N. perhaps, to manufacture, deploy and conceal weapons of mass destruction.”

Heh. Read the whole thing — the final sentence is the, er, killer.

INTERESTING OBSERVATIONS on “war tourism,” NGOs, and nuclear threats, from Baghdad blogger Salam Pax.

OLIVER WILLIS is football-blogging, and I think he plans to keep it up. He also asks a question that I wish I had thought to ask, and makes an observation worth a lot of people’s attention:

Dave Winer throws in some Internet triumphalism describing how “In 2003, when we want to, we can beat the NY Times, on a technical subject” in relation to today’s worm attack.

What use is any “internet reporting” when half the internet is inaccessible?

ALSO: This thing should make us think twice about how net-centric we want to make things. ATM machines were disrupted for most of the day, and I can bet that telephony like Vonage was offline as well.

Plus, he’s got cheerleader photos!

N.Z. BEAR HAS A CROSS-EXAMINATION OF HANS BLIX that’s worth reading.

BUSH’S FAILURE: He’s doing all right on the war — but he’d better be, because this is really damning:

WASHINGTON — Addressing the delegates more than two years ago at the Republican National Convention, President Bush invoked a line that had become a sort of mantra.

“Big government is not the answer,” he said.

Now, just past the midway point of his first term in office, Bush is presiding over the largest, most expensive — and, some would say, most intrusive — federal government in history.

Domestically, we might have a smaller government with Al Gore as President. As the article notes:

In the past five years, while median household income has grown by about 16 percent, the federal government’s spending has increased by 45 percent.

The trend was under way when Bush took office. After a four-year period ending in 1997 that saw fairly stable spending management — Congress’ budget authority grew from $509 billion to $511 billion — a spike began in 1998, when federal spending got an $18 billion boost to $529 billion. Spending in 2003 could top $750 billion.

Okay, a lot of that happened under Clinton/Gore — but Bush promised to stop it, not to carry on the policies of his predecessors. That was Gore’s schtick.

UPDATE: Matthew Yglesias points up another dropped ball, though he’s surprisingly charitable about it. Still, someone in the White House needs to be paying more attention here.

JIM HENLEY is now in his new bloghome. I don’t think you’ll notice a lot of difference in the way it looks, but it’s an MT setup on a more stable host.

CHEMICAL WARFARE SUITS WERE FOUND in the Finsbury Park Mosque raid:

BRITISH police investigating a terror plot by Islamic saboteurs have found chemical warfare protection suits in a north London mosque.

The discovery has shocked detectives, who believe the find confirms supporters of Osama bin Laden were planning a poison attack on civilian targets in Britain.

Scotland Yard and MI5 detectives had kept the discovery of the nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) suits secret.

They feared disclosing it would spark panic.

Government ministers have warned any suggestion that the Finsbury Park mosque had been involved would have worrying racist overtones.

It would? Why, exactly?

ROBERT MUSIL has an answer for Maureen Dowd.

PUNDITWATCH is up, and features a memorable quote from David Brooks.

DEFENSETECH REPORTS that the United States is considering pre-emptive nuclear strikes in Iraq.

Hmm. If we were really considering it, would we be leaking it? Possibly, I suppose.

UPDATE: Oliver Willis thinks it’s disinformation. But what if that’s what they want us to think . . . .?

“THE JUDENREIN ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT:” Kesher Talk reports that even leftie Jews are being frozen out of A.N.S.W.E.R. – organized marches if they believe that Israel has a right to exist.

Huh? I thought this was all about peace, and Iraq. How did Israel get into this? You think there’s a bigger agenda here?

TODD STEED, who I was in a band with once back when Jimmy Carter was President, has a new album out called “Knoxville Tells.” You can follow the link to read about it, or read a review here, or you can hear “East Towne Mall” here. You can hear “Smoky Mountain Dip” in RealAudio here.

There’s more vintage Steed here, including two of my favorite songs, “Five O’Clock” and “Ethiopian Jokes.” Yet another reason why I’m glad to live in Knoxville.

READER RAFAEL S. is disturbed by this defaced American flag featured in the Davos protests. “I hope the 3 bloody stars don’t represent the 3 states hit by Al-Qaeda,” he writes, asking “What else could it mean?”

I don’t know. Any ideas?

Then there’s this. Jeez. Andrew Sullivan has commentary.

UPDATE: Meryl Yourish has more.

EUROPE AND AMERICA: Gianni Riotta writes in the Post:

It is not America’s unilateralism that relegates Europe to the kids’ table. It is Europe’s budget priorities. Europe spends $2.50 a day on every cow that grazes happily on the grass of the EU. Yet defense spending lags. Andrew Moravcsik, a professor of government at Harvard University, estimates that “the United States spends five times more on military R&D than all of Europe.” Europe’s soldiers cannot fight beside their U.S. comrades-in-arms because they lack technology such as the AN/Pvs-7 night vision goggles; the U.S. Army has 215,000 of them. European forces have 11 heavy military transport planes; U.S. forces have 250.

The United States will accept Europe as a real equal when it sees muscle behind diplomacy. However much Europeans dislike Uncle Sam’s war machine, they forget that Europe can’t fight without it.

Yes. And the United States would, I think, be happy if Europe took actual responsibility for some of the world’s problems instead of carping from the sidelines. Most of America’s biggest problem areas, after all, from Vietnam to the Middle East, were inherited from others. But so long as Europe favors subsidies over substance, carping from the sidelines will be all it can do.