IF UNIVERSITY EMPLOYEES make public statements about the inherent evil of male genitalia, and those statements accompany acts of anti-male vandalism, is that a “hostile environment” that would support a lawsuit for sex discrimination?

Just asking.

INTERESTING STORY ON SADDAM’S WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION: From Iran.

WELL, I GUESS I CALLED THIS ONE, DIDN’T I? Russia ready to veto U.S.-British resolution on Iraq to protect `international stability’ — or at least contracts. As I suspected below, French efforts at a rapprochement with the United States are premised on Russia doing the dirty work.

ERIC MULLER THINKS that human shields may be prosecuted for treason — and that they may deserve it.

JOHN COUMARIANOS has some thoughts on the Administration’s ongoing — and major — foreign policy realignment.

KRAUTHAMMER IS RIGHT:

France is not doing this to contain Iraq — France spent the entire 1990s weakening sanctions and eviscerating the inspections regime as a way to end the containment of Iraq. France is doing this to contain the United States. As I wrote last week, France sees the opportunity to position itself as the leader of a bloc of former great powers challenging American supremacy.

That is a serious challenge. It requires a serious response. We need to demonstrate that there is a price to be paid for undermining the United States on a matter of supreme national interest.

First, as soon as the dust settles in Iraq, we should push for an expansion of the Security Council — with India and Japan as new permanent members — to dilute France’s disproportionate and anachronistic influence.

Second, there should be no role for France in Iraq, either during the war, should France change its mind, or after it. No peacekeeping. No oil contracts. And France should be last in line for loan repayment, after Russia. Russia, after all, simply has opposed our policy. It did not try to mobilize the world against us.

It should be expensive to cross the United States on an important matter. And this is an important matter.

BIGWIG IS PROPOSING AN EXPERIMENT and reports that preliminary results look promising.

MATTHEW YGLESIAS has more on blood donation, and says that the ever-stiffening requirements for blood donation are largely unfounded. I’m not so sure, though, that the motivation is to drive up the price of blood. That’s a suggestion I was skeptical of when I posted on this last year, and I still regard it as unlikely, though not impossible. More likely, I think, they’re just overreacting to their ball-dropping over HIV.

DOES THE NEW WTC REPLACEMENT DESIGN look like the Fortress of Solitude? That seems a common reaction.

HEY, THERE’S AN ANTIPUNDIT: If the two of us ever met, would we cancel out? Or suffer mutual annihilation and explode?

I hope not. He seems like a pretty nice guy.

CHARLES MURTAUGH DELIVERS A RIGHTEOUS FISKING to anti-cloning legislation — and politicians.

UPDATE: Dipnut emails that Murtaugh’s treatment isn’t a Fisking. “That’s a calm, rational refutation of Sam Brownback.”

“This,” he writes, “is a righteous Fisking.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Justin Katz has replied to Murtaugh.

BLOOD BLOGGING: Fritz Schranck responds to my blood-donation post and photo below by noting:

Some folks might have been surprised to see absolute proof that an attorney’s blood is in fact the same familiar red color found in humans and other mammals.

He also suggests that bloggers might want to get behind blood-donation efforts in general, and he’s created a nice little button, visible to the right.

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.