DORIAN HO is making SARS look as good as is humanly possible. I’d award an “A” for effort, anyway.

JACOB SULLUM is writing about the idiocy of the assault weapon ban — and the dishonesty of those who are pretending that it accomplishes anything:

To get around the fact that “assault weapons” are rarely used by criminals, the VPC is now claiming that from 1998 through 2001 “one in five law enforcement officers slain in the line of duty was killed with an assault weapon.” This estimate is padded by the inclusion of weapons that Congress does not define as “assault weapons” but that the VPC does. In any case, it indicates that the vast majority of cop killers use guns that no one considers to be “assault weapons.”

Notice, too, that banning guns does not prevent them from being used in crimes, which makes you wonder what good even an “improved” ban could be expected to accomplish. Even if cop killers were fond of “assault weapons” and if passing a law could magically eliminate them, it’s absurd to imagine that violent criminals could not find adequate substitutes.

The “assault weapon” ban sets a dangerous precedent precisely because the justification for it is so weak. It suggests that you don’t need a good reason to limit the right to keep and bear arms, and it invites further restrictions down the road. As far as the gun banners are concerned, that is the whole point.

Funny that we don’t see many journalists asking the VPC tough questions about its stance on these issues.

WHAT DO YOU GET WHEN YOU’RE JAILED AND THEN EXONERATED: Damn near nothing, writes Emily Bazelon in The New York Times:

Yet when the wrongfully convicted gain their freedom, they’re usually not entitled to the social services, like help with housing and jobs, that other released convicts receive. (They’re not on probation or eligible for other ex-offender programs.) Just as troubling, they rarely get any money from state governments to make up for the years of lost freedom, livelihood and time with loved ones.

For what they’ve suffered, these victims deserve better. Since the state fractured their lives, it should help them put the pieces back together.

Most of the innocent get little or nothing because only 15 states and the District of Columbia have laws to help the exonerated collect damages. And some of the statutes aid very few people, either because they severely restrict awards — in California the ceiling is $10,000, no matter how long the unwarranted prison sentence — or limit relief to those lucky enough to get a pardon from the governor instead of relief from a judge.

I think that people who have been wrongly jailed deserve some genuine compensation. Ten grand is pathetic. A hundred grand seems modest. But nobody wants to admit mistakes, and compensation would seem like an admission of just how much harm was done.

READ THE WHOLE THING: Michael Barone writes about Hard America and Soft America, and he’s onto something big.

ANDREW SULLIVAN AND MICKEY KAUS are all over the Jayson Blair affair, and Howell Raines. And it looks like they’ve got the goods.

It certainly appears that my earlier skepticism regarding the role of affirmative action in the Blair matter was misplaced. (See this post, too.) I suppose that’s what I get for giving Raines the benefit of the doubt, but, hey, InstaPundit is all about excruciating fairness.

I MISSED THE STORY about the Case Western shooting, but Matthew Rustler has been on the case.

UPDATE: Charles Johnson notes something interesting about the shooter:

Halder was a very active and outspoken member of the loony left anti-war crowd; here is his home page. He was a signer of the Student Committee of the Iraq Action Coalition and the Not In Our Name petition.

Well, “anti-war” isn’t necessarily the same as “nonviolent,” of course. . . .

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh notes an interesting inconsistency.

KEN LAYNE HAS ONLINE MUSIC over at MP3.com — and it’s pretty good. Kinda like a cross between the Stones and Webb Wilder. Which can’t be bad.

JEFF JARVIS HAS MORE ON COURAGEOUS IRANIAN BLOGGERS — and “courageous” is the word. These people aren’t just courting a modicum of criticism on the Internet. They’re in danger of being killed by the increasingly-desperate mullahs who still sort of run that unfortunate country.

HAVE YOU EVER NOTICED THAT WHEN JOURNALISTS ATTACK BLOGS they usually seem to make some sort of stupid, glaring error that completely undercuts their point?

That’s what the Toronto Star did in attacking Stefan Sharkansky. Despite it being right there in print (well, pixels) columnist Antonia Zerbisias managed to attribute to Stefan a quote that was actually by an anonymous commenter.

Was it utter, unforgivable sloppiness — or actual, deliberate malice?

Who cares? It’s more proof that having an editor and a paycheck doesn’t make you God. Or, apparently, even minimally competent.

But as Stefan points out, it can make you popular with Holocaust deniers.

UPDATE: Spoons says I’m wrong:

Zerbisias attributed the quotes as what is being said on web logs and web forums. His attributions were correct. He never attributed the quotes to any particular individuals, and I don’t think he made an error at all, much less an error as horrible as you suggest.

Well, it’s true that Zerbisias said that the statement appeared “on usefulwork.com,” and that, literally, it did, though as a comment. But to say that something appeared “on” a blog is pretty obviously attribution to the blog’s author, in my opinion. You could say that, literally, that’s not necessarily the case and that everything in the comments is “on” the blog, but that kind of attribution is only fair if it’s fair to attribute things said in letters to the editor to the newspapers they appear in. (Er, and I think Zerbisias is a she.)

HERE’S THE LATEST on jailed Iranian blogger Sina Motallebi. He’s accused of selling “depraved” videos — of weddings.

Note to Iranian mullahs: you’re utterly pathetic. You are neither feared, nor respected for your piety. You’re just a joke, in the eyes of the world and, these days, your own people.

BILL HOBBS IS ASTOUNDED BY THE REACTION to his piece on the Bush/AWOL question. He admits to committing premeditated journalism.

MORE ON THE LOOTING THAT MOSTLY WASN’T:

AMERICAN investigators in Iraq have found safely locked in vaults almost 40,000 manuscripts and 700 artefacts previously believed to have been looted from the National Museum in Baghdad.

Next we’ll discover that the Jenin massacre never happened. Oh, wait. . . .

RANDY BARNETT IS DANCING ON BILL BENNETT’S POLITICAL GRAVE:

Bennett is more than a moralist; he is a prohibitionist. And he is more than a prohibition advocate, he was the drug-czar almighty. For years he defended the current policy of ruining the lives of drug users — regardless of whether their actions were harming others. Many of us still recall his condescending reply to Milton Friedman’s open letter to him in the pages of the Wall Street Journal where he chided the Nobel Prize winner to be serious. From editorial page to podium, Bennett loudly and righteously defended the policy of wre[a]king havoc on his fellow citizens who indulged in different vices than he did — whether or not their vices happened to interfere with their abilities to perform their jobs or be good parents. It did not matter whether or not they had “spent the milk money.” All that mattered was whether they were caught by the cops. Then off to the clink with them.

Kurtz says that Bennett is entitled to run a different cost-benefit calculation for gambling than for drugs. Then why has he now said he is setting a bad example to others and quitting? Either he has just changed his cost-benefit analysis this week, or he was a hypocrite last week.

Read the whole thing. Meanwhile Peter Beinart has a long Bennett-savaging piece, too. But although it’s about hypocrisy, I find it a lot less persuasive than Barnett’s take. Beinart writes:

And, while Bennett may be one of Washington’s most high-profile right-wing moralists, he’s surely not alone. John Ashcroft, Rick Santorum, Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jesse Helms, Alan Keyes, Sean Hannity–they would all come in for similar scrutiny. In fact, dozens, if not hundreds, of Republicans in Congress have probably said the same things about private morality as Bennett. If this sounds like a slippery-slope argument, it is. I don’t see any clear principle that justifies exposing Bennett’s gambling that wouldn’t justify prying into the private lives of most public representatives of the cultural right.

Sorry, but this conveniently one-sided standard, which Beinart sort-of decries but also sort-of deploys, won’t wash — at least, not until the mainstream press, and the Washington punditry, is willing to make as much of the way big-name moralizing lefties like Michael Moore treat the help as it is of the vices of right-wing moralizers. And that day is nowhere close at hand. Otherwise the scandal at living-wage-activism center ACORN would be getting the kind of attention that would be afforded to a sex scandal at Moral Majority headquarters.

UPDATE: Virginia Postrel emails:

I think you read that Beinart piece wrong. It’s not an attack on Bennett, though it has plenty of nasty things to say about him. It’s an attack on people who’ve suddenly and conveniently jettisoned their alleged social liberalism to attack Bennett.

Well, I puzzled over that, but I think Beinart is trying to have it both ways here, which is what I meant by the language about decrying and deploying. He’s sort-of complaining about people jettisoning their alleged social liberalism, but he spends a lot more time attacking Bennett’s hypocrisy in terms that sound an awful lot like the pseudo-liberals he’s talking about.

RICH LOWRY HAS A QUESTION THAT I’D LIKE TO HEAR ANSWERED — by Bill Lockyer and John Ashcroft, for starters:

Our tolerance for prison rape, considered a subject fit for late-night TV humor, is a great mystery. We profess to abhor rape, to adore personal dignity, to uphold the rights of the downtrodden — yet we sentence tens of thousands of men every year to the most bestial kind of abuse, without a second thought beyond the occasional chuckle.

The silence surrounding this national shame has been broken by a right-left coalition in Washington that is pushing federal prison-rape legislation, likely to pass and be signed into law this year. It will be a first step to alleviating the problem, if not the end of the vile jokes. . . .

The bill seems impossible to oppose, but that hasn’t stopped elements of the Bush Justice Department from resisting. They worry that the bill trespasses on federalism principles, even though the Supreme Court has held that deliberate indifference to rape violates the Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

I don’t see the federalism issue here — you’ve got state action, and a violation of constitutional rights. So where’s Ashcroft on this?

UPDATE: Reader Ken Landa has a suggestion:

Maybe the energy of those intent on protecting those vile consensual-sodomy prohibitions could be channelled into doings something about _forced_ sodomy in penal settings.

Indeed.

UPDATE: TalkLeft has more on this.

HOWARD KURTZ REPORTS THAT everybody hates Mike Bloomberg. It’s spun mostly as a failure of political savvy, but I wonder if Bloomberg’s policies don’t have as much to do with it as his political clumsiness. Bloomberg seems to want to turn New York into Singapore — only without the efficiency or prosperity. It’s not just that he’s a political naif, it’s that he’s a bossy, priggish assaulter of all that New York is supposed to be about.

UPDATE: Well, Bloomberg has his defenders, as reader Clay Boswell writes:

You suggest that Bloomberg is hated because his policies are contrary to what New York is supposed to be about. Which policies are you referring to? The smoking ban–okay. What else? He’s not responsible for the MTA fare increase–those are Pataki’s people, though nobody seems to recognize that. The school system needs changing, and he’s moved there–the only people bothered by that are the bureaucrats in the school board and the people in Albany who won’t let go, whether they know what to do with their power or not. And the teachers who shouldn’t be teaching–I doubt you sympathize with them. The tax increases? Is New York about low taxes? If they don’t rise at least temporarily, New York is going to be about bankruptcy.

On the other hand, reader Dave O’Leary writes:

You hit the nail on the head. He wants to put training wheels on the City. Additionally, we elected him in the hopes that his business acumen could guide us through the tough economic times that obviously lay ahead. Instead he shown himself to be an adherent of everything that’s been wrong with NYC economics for the ages. His solution to every financial problem is the same, raise taxes. Additionally, he destroyed much needed credibility by citing fictional statistics during his smoking jihad. The first act of his successor, anyone but Sharpton please, should be to run him out of town.

The smoking ban seems to be a special irritant, and not just among smokers.

DIGITAL COMMUNISM AND MARX’S NIGHTMARE: Arnold Kling reflects.

PAUL STAINES SUGGESTS THAT IRAQ should honor its debts to Russia, “with easily and cheaply sourced Czarist bonds.”

HUGH HEWITT HAS BEEN SLANDERING JAMES LILEKS. But at least he didn’t mention the underwear thing.

MICKEY KAUS wonders why Paul Krugman is keeping silent.

PATRIOT II SNEAKING IN THE BACK DOOR? TalkLeft notes that — though the bill was “just a draft” — it appears to be being passed piecemeal.

MARK KLEIMAN WONDERS: WHAT’S RIGHT WING about opposing reactionary theocrats?

Yeah, I’ve wondered that, too.

UPDATE: And Rand Simberg was wondering that quite some time ago.

MORE REPRESSION OF INDEPENDENT THOUGHT IN JOHN ASHCROFT’S AMERICA:

Animal rights protesters vandalized the home of two UCLA researchers last week, according to a police report filed by the victims.

On-campus demonstrations that coincided with World Week for Animals in Laboratories were followed by protests in some researchers’ neighborhoods Monday.

John Schlag, a neurobiology professor, and Madeleine Schlag-Rey, a neurobiology researcher, two targets of animal rights activists, said their home was damaged by protesters.

At 10:15 p.m. Monday night, Schlag said they heard a lot of noise on the street, followed by loud banging and kicking on their door.

“The way it proceeded … we felt that the door was going to be kicked in,” Schlag-Rey said.

The Schlags, whose research focuses on the mechanisms of human sight, filed a police report with the Los Angeles Police Department that listed a broken street lamp and a broken door window as a result of the vandalism. Neighbors told the police that the suspects were wearing masks and dark clothing.

People told me that if Bush became President, we’d have masked thugs banging on professors’ doors in the middle of the night.

And, what do you know, we do.

UPDATE: Okay, not everyone got this:

Your sense of irony may be a little TOO subtle, Glenn. When I read the entry entitled, “MORE REPRESSION OF INDEPENDENT THOUGHT IN JOHN ASHCROFT’S AMERICA:”, I sat down to rip out a protest letter. I mean, Bush and Ashcroft have plenty of policies that should be opposed, but how do you hang this around their necks? Then I detected the irony (I think).

Then there was this:

Maybe I’m just a bit dim, but I don’t get the connection between the animal rights thugs and Mr. Ashcroft. I understand you have concerns with civil liberties with him as AG, but to suggest some kind of link between the two is pretty far off the mark.

I think it’s fair to say that the animal rights groups are very far to the left and antigovernment while Mr. Ashcroft is fairly conservatives.

The post was not consistent with your usual quality.

Apparently not. I was paraphrasing the famous joke: “They told me if I voted for Goldwater we’d have half a million men in Vietnam. And sure enough, I voted for Goldwater and. . . .”

INSECURITY AND HIERARCHY IN THE HUMANITIES: An interesting post, with links to still more, from Invisible Adjunct.

SARS UPDATE: Russia is closing down air travel with China. This worries me, since the Russians, quite probably, have a better idea how bad things are in China than I do, and I think that things in China are worse than the media coverage suggests. (Though here is a worrisome media story about 10,000 people being quarantined in Nanjing.)

I hope that I’m wrong, and that Michael Fumento is right, and that this is all overblown.

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE INTERNET. Now close those pop-up ads, you asshats!