OVER AT WINDS OF CHANGE, Dan Darling has more on the Riyadh bombings — and it’s long, link-filled, and informative.

UPDATE: Sullivan thinks it’s overreach by Al Qaeda.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Virginia Postrel writes: “I wonder if Al Jazeera had its usual gory pictures?” She notes that its English-language web coverage (falsely) says the bomb targeted expats.

Yeah, if you had much doubt about where Al Jazeera’s sympathies lie, the coverage of this story should lay it to rest.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader John Chilton thinks I’ve over-read Virginia’s post and the Al Jazeera story:

Again: a “compound of ARAB expatriates.”

As an American living in the UAE I have become well aware that the Gulf States are full of expats both western and Arab. Terrorists want to get rid of all expats regardless of whether they are westerners, Arabs, or those from the sub continent. Expats simply refers nonnationals of any nationality. It goes on to highlight this quote from a survivor: “This is a crime against Arabs and Muslims and innocent people and those who carried out this evil act are defiling Islam”
And it shows a picture of a bloodied male victim who could be an Arab.

Hmm. Either I misread this entirely or it’s changed. More likely it’s the former. I apologize for the error.

CLAYTON CRAMER is thinking of creating a separate blog just for civilian defensive gun uses, because they’re so common that they’re taking over his regular blog. And he didn’t even mention this one:

Two suspected robbers are dead after a former police officer and owner of a Detroit bar fired a single shot, Local 4 reported. . . .

Police say the 49-year-old woman who owned the restaurant — a retired Detroit cop who was a former member of Mayor Coleman Young’s security team — tried to hold the suspects in the parking lot until police arrived. But when the two men attempted to speed away, and nearly ran over one of her employees, she fired a single shot that apparently struck both men, according to police.

Don’t mess with her.

UPDATE: D’oh! He did mention it, here. There are just so many that I missed it, proving his point.

I MENTIONED IT BEFORE, but enough people are still emailing to tell me about the new Iraqi blog called The Messopotamian that I’ll mention it again. (No, that’s not a typo — it’s a pun. I guess.) The first mention obviously didn’t take.

Also, don’t miss Iraq At A Glance, which is even newer, and Healing Iraq, which isn’t, but which is still pretty new.

ARMED LIBERAL remembers Veterans’ Day.

UPDATE: Donald Sensing liked the Jessica Lynch TV movie. (Former TV critic Jeff Jarvis didn’t.)

FOR THE 65TH ANNIVERSARY OF KRISTALLNACHT, Jeff Jarvis offers some interesting links.

JOHN SCALZI IS BLOGGING FOR LITERACY: Follow the link for the details.

GLENN FISHBINE has an interesting PowerPoint-based course on nanotechnology available for download. There are PDF versions, too, for people who don’t do PowerPoint.

UPDATE: And there’s loads of nanotechnology news over at Howard Lovy’s Nanobot blog. Don’t miss it!

PLAYING MEETUP OR PLAYING CATCH-UP? Either way, Bush supporters plan a Bush Meetup using Meetup.com, something already pioneered by the Dean campaign, of course. It’s scheduled for Tuesday evening at various locations around the country. (Via BlogsforBush).

It’ll be interesting to see whether this approach will work as well for an incumbent as it has for an insurgent.

VITRIOL IN POLITICS: Michael Barone has an interesting observation:

What we are seeing is a civil war between the two halves of the baby boom, the liberal half that basked in national publicity in the late 1960s and the conservative half that smoldered in resentment for many years until its more recent rise to prominence.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Roger Simon says Barone’s analysis is too simple: “You can be for gay marriage and democracy in Iraq, even if you’re over forty.” And read this, too.

LOTS OF NEW POSTS worth reading over at Jeff Jarvis’s and at OxBlog. Check ’em out.

MARK STEYN ON LIBERAL MEDIA BIAS: “Bring it on, baby!”

After the US elections a year ago, I decided that “liberal media bias” was far more harmful to liberals than conservatives. In fact, if I were a Democrat, I’d be getting a little miffed at the recurring pattern of the past two years: throughout the election campaign, my newspaper produces a poll showing my guy way ahead; finds “typical voters” (choreographers of environmentalist dance companies, etc) anxious to blame Bush for the worst recession since Hoover; runs front-page features on how Clinton’s flown in to campaign with my man, exuding the rock-star glamour that so enthuses the base, etc.

And then the morning after election night, I wake up to discover that, in a stunning upset utterly predictable to anyone but the expert media analysts, the Democrat got hammered.

But not to worry. Just as your rattled Democratic supporter is beginning to feel a harsh jab of reality in what Slate’s Mickey Kaus calls the “liberal cocoon”, the media rush to lull him back to the land of make-believe, assuring us that the Democrat defeat is attributable to strictly local factors and is definitely not part of a trend.

Oddly enough, all these non-trends seem to trend the same way: November 2002 – Democrats lose control of the US Senate; October 2003 – Democrats lose the California gubernatorial race; November 2003 – Democrats lose the Mississippi and Kentucky gubernatorial races.

If it weren’t for media bias, Steyn suggests, Democrats might be trying to do something about this.

TERRORISTS STRIKE: In Riyadh.

UPDATE: Michael Gersh thinks this is a big deal.

I SAW THE VIDEO of this high-school drug raid in South Carolina, with students lying on the floor while cops pointed guns at them. (Even more pathetically, no drugs were found.)

The traditional American remedy for such official overreaching, back when the Constitution was adopted, was tarring and feathering. Perhaps this “originalist” approach should be revived. If that had been my kid on the floor, I’d be sorely tempted.

Short of that, the police chief, prosecutor, and anyone else responsible should be sacked. Immediately.

UPDATE: Reader Aaron Hegeman emails:

Frankly, I think everyone’s missing the big scandal. Yeah, sure, maybe civil liberties were infringed, and maybe there was excessive use of force. Whatever. But how stupid do you have to be to raid a high school and actually not find any drugs? That’s like busting into a fraternity party with beer-sniffing dogs and not finding a keg.

Well, that part’s pretty lame, I admit, but I don’t think it’s the big scandal here. Meanwhile Michael Graham writes:

I know [Principal] George McCrackin from my days at WSC in Charleston, SC. He became part of the Michael Graham Experience when he started kicking straight-A students out of school because their shirts weren’t tucked in. No, I’m not exaggerating. He felt it was vital for maintaining discipline to keep all shirttails out of public view.

He also wanted mandatory uniforms, but he couldn’t find enough brown shirts or red armbands…

So when I saw the video on CNN of the gun-wielding goons terrorizing school kids, my first thought was of ol’ George. Sure enough…

Sheesh. He’s got more.

ANOTHER UPDATE: You can see the video here. And here’s the home page for Stratford High School.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Perry De Havilland says that there’s an important lesson for America’s children in this: “The State is not your friend.”

MORE: Armed Liberal comments:

My primary response is to project my reaction had it been my son’s high school, and had my son faced officers with weapons in low-ready who told him to sit with his back to the wall and put his hands on his head. . . .

As someone who shoots, I’ve learned a healthy respect for what it means to have a loaded weapon out and in my hand. I have trained with enough LEO’s and military to have heard the horror stories – a SWAT officer in Ventura County mistakenly shot and killed by his partner in the course of a raid; a young actor at a Halloween party shot and killed by an officer who saw him holding an all-too-real prop gun.

I’ve heard about accidents in which Negligent Discharges (there are no Accidental Discharges) put rounds into handcuffed suspects, and accidents in training where experienced officers accidentally shoot into the ground, sending lethal spall and ricochet fragments scattering through a room.

And that’s only on the partial issue of the decision by the officers to draw their weapons.

The notion that they could cordon off a part of a school, detain everyone there, and on unsubstantiated rumor, search each of them is outrageous. It violates everything I know about our relation as citizens – not suspects – to the power of the state.

Indeed. The police response is that the guns weren’t aimed at the kids, they were in low-ready position. When kids are lying on the floor, that’s a distinction without a difference — just watch the video.

STILL MORE: Reader Brian R. Leone emails:

You cannot see it on the grainy/artifact prone internet video feed, but when the networks were showing this footage you could clearly see at least one of the officers had his finger ON THE TRIGGER while he was covering these kids with the muzzle of his weapon. Simply inexcusable. One wrong twitch and an innocent kid dies. I wonder what the law of “negligent infliction of emotional distress” looks like in that state. If I were an attorney in that jurisdiction, I’d take on the whole group of students pro bono.

I was at the gym when I saw the network broadcast, and I didn’t notice that — but it’s inexcusable if true. Every handgun training program I’ve ever taken has stressed that fingers don’t go on the trigger, even when confronting someone who might be dangerous, until you’re ready to shoot, and for very good reason.

THE ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME will feature a speech by Hungary’s ambassador, Andras Simonyi, on rock music and its role in political change. That’s something that I’ve written on before, and it sounds as if we’re on the same page. Winds of Change has more, too.

UPDATE: “We’re taking the history test, of who’s baddest and who is best: Lennon the brother, Lennon the sisters, Lenin the communist.” Discuss.

THE GUARDIAN reports: “300,000 Iraqis May Be in Mass Graves.”

UPDATE: Stephen Green comments.

JFK AND GWB: the similarities. Hmm. Well, I had an interesting conversation at dinner in Washington a couple of weeks back, about whether being a “New Frontiers liberal” makes you practically a libertarian these days. Not really, but it may make you a GWB Republican.

Except that Kennedy was better on the budget. Of course, it was easier back then.

UPDATE: Roger Simon — who actually remembers JFK — comments.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Donald Sensing notes that he pointed this out over a year ago. And he’s quite pleased with himself about it. . . .

WHY WE DON’T TRUST THE NEWS: I’ve had the same kind of experience that Roger Ebert recounts here:

Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. “Wouldn’t you say,” she asked, “that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?” No, I said, I wouldn’t say that. “But what about ‘Basketball Diaries’?” she asked. “Doesn’t that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?” The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it’s unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.

The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. “Events like this,” I said, “if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn’t have messed with me. I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.”

In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of “explaining” them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.

Sometimes I get interviewed by people who genuinely want to understand something. Just as often, I get interviewed by people who have their story already planned, and just want me to utter the appropriate sound bite for the slot they’ve selected. They become quite disappointed if I don’t do that. And I think my experience is pretty typical — and that in this media-fied age, it’s shared by a lot of other people.

UPDATE: Michael Barone emails:

Your posting on media interviews brought to mind a comment by the late Massachusetts Congressman James Burke, a Ways and Means Committee member who once said, “You only need to know two things here: shoes and Social Security.” Burke was asked about a young liberal House member. “That guy,” he said, sighing. “He thinks this place is on the level.”

So it goes with most TV news interviews. When bookers used to call to ask me what I thoughtabout some issue I didn’t want to talk about it, I would say, “Gee, that’s not a very interesting issue. I don’t think I have anything to say about it.” They hung up very quickly.

Another reader adds: “Unfortunately, Ebert’s experience does not just apply to the media. I learned in graduate school working on my Ph.D. that this is the way most social scientists approach their work.” Sigh.