MORE GUN CONTROL, MORE CRIME:

Gun crime in England and Wales rose to record levels in the past year, with nearly 200 incidents every week.

There were 10,250 incidents, including 80 murders, involving firearms in the year to April, 276 (about 3 per cent) more than the previous year and double the number recorded five years ago.

Overall crime has dropped in the past few months, Home Office statistics show, but there is a continuing rise in the number of violent offences recorded by the police.

Not a smashing success, so far.

RICH HAILEY thinks that things are looking up for Bush. Walter Russell Mead thinks so, too.

IRAQ’S FIRST BURGER KING is already in the top ten for sales worldwide. (Via LL).

SGT. STRYKER’S IS RUNNING AN EXPERIMENT, trying to sum up both positive and negative stories about Iraq in a balanced way using a unique format.

Hey, maybe it’ll catch on!

MERYL YOURISH HAS MORE THOUGHTS on the Easterbrook flap, and suggests that people email Slate to suggest that it pick up Easterbrook’s TMQ column.

UPDATE: Reader Joel Buckingham writes:

People shouldn’t contact ESPN or Slate, contact FOX Sports Net, I know Easterbrook doesn’t care for the DirecTV Monopoly, but what better way to get back at ABC, go to the company that is running over ABC like a tank over well…Either way, I say Easterbrook should do TMQ for FSN, then wow…think of the traffic that would bring to Fox, I bet they’d love to take a swipe at ESPN/ABC too.

Heh. Getting Easterbrook a new job isn’t my goal, though the fact that many of his toughest critics — and I think that Meryl Yourish may well have been his very toughest critic — are trying to do just that indicates that ESPN, or Disney, or Michael Eisner, or somebody, overreacted here. If you’ve missed this whole flap (say, because you have a “life” and don’t spend your weekend reading blogs), you can read what I think here, and links to what, well, pretty much everyone else thinks here.

Interestingly, I just did a Google News search for Easterbrook + ESPN and there’s no sign of any major-media coverage of this story at all. So if you haven’t been reading blogs, you won’t have heard of it, I guess.

C.D. HARRIS is unimpressed by Democratic efforts to change the party’s position on gun control, seeing them as merely cosmetic.

I MENTIONED THIS BEFORE, but Chief Wiggles’ toy drive is back in business.

TONY BLAIR was hospitalized briefly for heart palpitations, but seems to be doing fine now.

Whew.

MEDIA COVERAGE IN IRAQ:

I went out to find a crater in front of the house. My god that was close. By a miracle nobody in the street was hurt. The idiots who planted that bomb were dumb enough to put it inside a sewers drainage which absorbed the shock of the blast. The only damage was the sound it made. Most of our windows were shattered.
After a while the soldiers left the place. Suddenly a reporter and a cameraman from Al-Arabiyah station appeared, they were so fast. I crossed the street to take a look. They were talking to some bearded guy who I hadn’t seen before in the neighbourhood. He was enthusiastically talking about the humvee that flew in the air, and the 4 injured soldiers. I didn’t see any of that. I was bewildered. Someone next to me told me that nothing like that happened at all. My brother and a couple of friends of his started to chant in front of the camera: LIAR, LIAR,… Everyone laughed at this, but the bearded guy started to swear by Allah. Someone pointed out that the bearded guy wasn’t even in the area when the bomb exploded. Uh oh, I thought, he seemed to know about it before it happened. The cameraman violently shoved my brother and his friend aside telling them to shut up. . . .

In the evening, Al-Arabiyah reported the following: 3 Americans badly injured and one Jeep damaged at …. in Baghdad. They showed the bearded guy talking and edited the rest of it.

Thats the way media in present day Iraq works.

At least the Western media don’t do anything like this.

THE L.A. FILM CRITICS have canceled their awards this year because of MPAA heavy-handedness.

MARK STEYN:

Even at the time, the Roeper position required a certain suspension of disbelief. John Allen Muhammad was a Muslim, a supporter of al-Qaida’s actions, a man who marked the events of Sept. 11 by changing his name to “Muhammad” and a man who marked the first anniversary of Sept. 11 by buying the Chevy Caprice subsequently used in the sniper attacks. Coincidence? Of course! According to Richard Roeper, it’s only a handful of conservative kooks who’d even think otherwise.

Interesting item from the London Evening Standard last week:

“Evidence has emerged linking Washington sniper John Allen Muhammad with an Islamic terror group. Muhammad has been connected to Al Fuqra, a cult devoted to spiritual purification through violence. The group has been linked to British shoe bomber Richard Reid and the murderers of American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan last year.”

Hmm. Might be nothing. Might be just another coincidence. Lot of them around at the moment — like that Saudi Cabinet minister who coincidentally stayed in the same hotel on the night of Sept. 10 as some of the 9/11 terrorists. Just one of those things. But the authorities seem to be taking the links more seriously than when they first surfaced a year ago.

Here’s another coincidence: The guy who heads up the organization that certifies Muslim chaplains for the U.S. military was arrested at Dulles Airport last month and charged with illegally accepting money from Libya. The month before that, Abdurahman Alamoudi was caught by the British trying to smuggle some $340,000 into Syria.

Think about that for a minute. Ten years ago, at an American military base, at a ceremony to install the first imam in this country’s armed forces, it was Alamoudi who presented him with his new insignia of a silver crescent star. And the guy’s a bagman for terrorists.

Read the whole thing. Yep, the Saudi connection is looking clearer all the time. And here’s the John Muhammad / Al Fuqra story that Steyn mentions. Stay tuned. (Via Bill Quick.)

UPDATE: Read this, too.

ANDREW SULLIVAN IS BACK IN THE NEW YORK TIMES TODAY, with the following observation:

In an appeal to the growing fundamentalism of the developing world, this is a shrewd strategy. In the global context, gays are easily expendable. But it is also a strikingly inhumane one. The current pope is obviously a deep and holy man; but that makes his hostility even more painful. He will send emissaries to terrorists, he will meet with a man who tried to assassinate him. But he has not and will not meet with openly gay Catholics. They are, to him, beneath dialogue.

Personally, I think that Yasser Arafat is worse than a gay parishioner. But I guess that’s just one of many things the Pope and I disagree about.

ROBERT TAGORDA has a list of Senators who voted for the Iraq loan-conversion, and who are up for reelection, with notes on which ones are most vulnerable.

ROGER SIMON has a disturbing report: He spoke with Gregg Easterbrook on the phone and Easterbrook has been fired from ESPN. I think that’s an overreaction, as does Roger:

I, as one of his harshest critics, believe that ESPN has vastly overreacted. I urge them to reconsider their decision. I don’t think anybody who attacked Easterbrook wanted to see him fired. I certainly didn’t.

I suspect that there’s blowback from the Limbaugh matter here. (Read this post for my thoughts on the subject, and why Easterbrook isn’t really the issue.)

UPDATE: ESPN seems to have gone Stalinist on us — now Gregg Easterbrook never wrote for them at all! Reader Gautam Mukunda emails:

ESPN (I have just discovered) has actually done something much creepier than just firing Easterbrook, or even just removing his columns. If you go to their home page and use the “Search ESPN” function for the words Easterbrook or TMQ, it just returns you to the home page without result – it’s as if the search just vanishes. If you use a word that only Easterbrook has ever used on ESPN.com (I used haiku) then you will get results from his columns – although they have been removed. But if someone tries to find his column through the obvious ways, they seem to have rigged the search engine to act as if the search never happened.

This is a real pity, and not just for Easterbrook. Almost every football fan I know – myself included – thought of TMQ as the best football column anywhere. I hope that Slate picks it up again.

Creepy is right. And especially bizarre given that the whole flap was about something that wasn’t even published at ESPN.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Rishawn Biddle and Jonah Goldberg think that it was as much because Easterbrook dissed a Disney film as because of antisemitism charges per se.

MORE: Josh Chafetz says that it’s “outrageous,” and offers a link for people to email ESPN.

STILL MORE: Jeff Jarvis weighs in, and observes:

We have to stop being afraid of strong — and wrong — opinions. We have to stop being afraid of mere speech. We have to learn again to fight fire with fire — words, that is — rather than with nuclear weapons such as this.
When someone says something stupid, call it stupid. When they say something wrong, call it wrong. When they shout, shout back. That is the free marketplace of ideas and speech. That is democracy. Nothing to be afraid of there.
But if we try to cut off that free discussion, even when it is offensive, we cut off the marketplace of ideas, we cut off our own freedom.
What ESPN did is essentially insulting to its audience. They think we can’t take care of ourselves, that we can’t make our own judgments about Easterbrook and what he said and how he apologized; they are condescending to us when they think they are protecting us from offense.

Read the whole thing.

MORE STILL: Meryl Yourish, perhaps Easterbrook’s fiercest critic, thinks that ESPN is totally wrong, and encourages people to email in Easterbrook’s support. So does Andrew Sullivan.

Reader Paul Stinchfield emails:

Harlan Ellison wrote in “The Glass Teat” (his collected essays on TV and movies) that Hollywood has a longstanding history of dehumanizing behaviors. You leave work Friday after a friendly conversation with your boss who praises your work and thanks you for your dedication, and come to work Monday morning to discover that you have been fired. Not only that, but your cubicle has disappeared. And people are afraid to talk to you. And the whispering campaign to destroy your professional reputation has begun. A project you worked on might be killed, even if it means much money lost, just to bolster the claim that you and your work were no good. In comparison to all that, erasing somebody from a website is so much easier.

Mickey Mouse has long been a rat.

Are rats prone to silly overreactions? Another reader with Disney experience smells a Disney hand in this and comments:

You can get fired for anything over there. And they treat you like shit while you work for them. They specialize in creative sadism towards the poor schmuck on the rung below. I kid you not. They’re really terrible people. Like most picture people.

(Several readers also emailed that working conditions at Disney are so bad that it’s nicknamed “Mouseschwitz,” ironically enough, and a Google search indicates that this is an actual nickname for the place. Ugh.) Glad I’m not in that business. Is Eisner really after Easterbrook? That would be petty, and silly, and entirely beneath him. I guess it’s possible. . . .

AND YET MORE: Kevin Drum:

Was this instead a reaction to the fact that Easterbrook took a shot at Disney and Michael Eisner, which owns ESPN? I sure hope not. Sure, normally you expect employees not to criticize the boss, but journalism is different. If Easterbrook got fired for that, it’s not much different than firing Peter Jennings for airing a news story critical of Disney.

He thinks ESPN owes an explanation, and wonders why it hasn’t produced one. Maybe ESPN can’t explain the decision, because the decision wasn’t made at ESPN?

It seems to me that this calls for a much closer look at the dangers of media consolidation. When a guy who works for ESPN can’t criticize Disney in The New Republic without being fired for dissing his “boss,” which is quite possibly what’s happened here, then something is seriously rotten.

Congressional hearings anyone? Maybe we should ask Eisner to testify. . . . Under oath.

STILL MORE: Dan Gillmor wonders about the Disney connection, too, and says it isn’t much of a surprise. Meanwhile Meryl Yourish points out some real antisemitism, by way of comparison. What’s Eisner doing about this? Trying to pretend it isn’t there, one suspects.

And read these cogent thoughts from Sean Hackbarth. Colby Cosh has comments, too.

Virginia Postrel: “Obviously I’m not a fan of his recent remarks. . . . But this is a bizarre overreaction to what should have been a one-day story.”

Eugene Volokh: “I thought Easterbrook’s comments were unsound and quite unpersuasive, but I don’t think they were anti-Semitic.” He calls the firing a “massive overreaction.”

Daniel Drezner: “This situation is not analagous to Rush Limbaugh’s. Easterbrook’s gaffe does not appear to have been on ESPN, and he’s apologized.”

Several readers note that they’re eagerly awaiting the firestorm of Big Media complaint about the “crushing of dissent” that appeared after radio stations stopped playing the Dixie Chicks for a while.

Dean Esmay is upset. To be fair, I think that Easterbrook is in no small way the author of his own misfortunes, but I think that the ESPN firing is an overreaction, and that Michael Eisner should take it like a man.

D.F. Moore, on the other hand, says that Eugene and I are wrong.

Laurence Simon:

The number one rule of Disney is NEVER INSULT KING MICHAEL. If it could be coded into the DNA of cast members, you’d see band-aids on th backs of their necks from the needle-pricks the next day.

Easterbrook broke that rule in calling him a mere supervisor.

Justice is swift, but injustice is doubly-so. The axe fell.

Laurence, as far as I know, is no relation to Roger.

Mathew Yglesias: “This raises the very real possibility that alleged anti-semitism is being used as a pretext for firing him for criticizing his bosses, which stinks.”

Atrios: “This likely had more to do with the fact that he criticized Eisner specifically than anything else, so if any good can come of this it’ll be Easterbrook writing a column on the dangers of big media consolidation.”

Me and Atrios — on the same page as usual. You notice you never see us photographed together.

Mark Byron: “I don’t think he should have been canned at ESPN, but when you call your erstwhile boss a greedy Jew, you can’t guarantee too many more paychecks.”

LETTERS FROM IRAQ: More firsthand accounts from the field.

Also, the former LT Smash has a military blog roundup, and notes that Chief Wiggles’ Iraqi toy drive is back in business.

A CANDIDATE with military experience and a popular blog. It’s like the best of Howard Dean and Wesley Clark rolled into one!

EXTRA-CRISPY GLOBALIZATION: One word: Heh.

MILITARY WIFE SARAH WALTER has a long post on the Washington Post’s troop morale story, which she says misrepresents what Stars and Stripes actually found. Her conclusion: “The negative slant of the Washington Post article is staggering.”

She’s got a lot of comparisons between what the Stars and Stripes story said and what the Post reported, with links to both.

TIM RUTTEN has a story on the Easterbrook flap. My comments, and the link, are here, so as to keep the thread together.

A SAUDI CONNECTION TO TERROR IN AMERICA? Go figure:

A secretive group of tightly connected Muslim charities, think tanks and businesses based in Northern Virginia were used to funnel millions of dollars to terrorists and launder millions more, according to court records unsealed yesterday. . . .

The probe of the Herndon groups is the largest federal investigation of terrorism financing in the world, authorities have said. And the unsealing of Kane’s report marks the first time the government has alleged the main purpose of the Virginia organizations, set up primarily with donations from a wealthy Saudi family, was to fund terrorism and hide millions of dollars.

(Emphasis added.) The big news isn’t that Saudis are funding terror, which has been obvious for a long time. It’s that here — and with the FBI story from yesterday — the U.S. government is admitting it. This suggests to me that the next phase in the war is starting.

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE: Foreign Affairs has reprinted Allen Dulles’ memo from occupied Germany, and it sounds rather familiar. Read the whole thing.

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS RETHINKING GUN CONTROL:

The perception that Democrats are hostile to the rights of gun owners has damaged the party in the last two elections and will do so again in 2004 unless they change their ways, the Democratic Leadership Council said yesterday.

Al From, founder of the centrist DLC, and Democratic Sens. Evan Bayh of Indiana and Mark Pryor of Arkansas said the antigun image perpetuates the idea that Democrats are “cultural elites,” alienating them from mainstream voters. . . .

Mr. Bayh, chairman of the DLC, said Democrats “have a credibility problem” on guns and national security issues.

“We cannot be perceived as cultural elitists and weak on national security issues,” Mr. Bayh said. “That’s not a prescription for victory for the Democratic Party.”

Makes sense to me. Hey, maybe if they work hard, they’ll have a shot at winning votes from guys like this:

GREENSBORO — Ron Simpson knows guns — and instantly knew the one in front of him Wednesday night was a phony.

Sure, the gun in the hands of the would-be robber at Action Video at 1058 Alamance Church Road had the look of a 9 mm, but Simpson, the manager, said he was “95 percent sure” the muzzle was too small to project a bullet.

“That is not a real gun,” Simpson told the robber. “This is a real gun,” he said, pulling a .25-caliber derringer from his front-right jeans pocket.

Sadly, right now the Democrats would be more likely to support prosecuting him for daring to defend himself with a gun — and a “Saturday night special” at that! (And yet Arlie Hochschild wonders why the Democrats can’t win over “NASCAR dads.”) But maybe they’ll improve. That would be a good thing, for the Democrats, and the country.

UPDATE: The Democrats are going to have to do better here — this approach doesn’t even win over a gay gun enthusiast from Vermont.

CONRAD OFFERS thoughts on photo captions.

IF THIS STORY turns out to be true, it’s pretty disgraceful:

FORT STEWART, Ga., Oct. 17 (UPI) — Hundreds of sick and wounded U.S. soldiers including many who served in the Iraq war are languishing in hot cement barracks here while they wait — sometimes for months — to see doctors.

The National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers’ living conditions are so substandard, and the medical care so poor, that many of them believe the Army is trying push them out with reduced benefits for their ailments. One document shown to UPI states that no more doctor appointments are available from Oct. 14 through Nov. 11 — Veterans Day. . . .

Most soldiers in medical hold at Fort Stewart stay in rows of rectangular, gray, single-story cinder block barracks without bathrooms or air conditioning. They are dark and sweltering in the southern Georgia heat and humidity. Around 60 soldiers cram in the bunk beds in each barrack.

I’m not sure, but I think the guy to talk to is Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, Dr. William Winkenwerder. If this story is in error, perhaps he can let me know. If it’s not, perhaps he can do something about it.

The DoD pages for his section don’t seem to provide any useful contact information, but perhaps someone out there will be able to find some.

UPDATE: That didn’t take long. Somebody sent me his email address, and I emailed him with a few questions.

MICHAEL RAPPAPORT has some thoughts on social conservatives and gay marriage.