OIL IN SIBERIA: Some interesting developments are afoot.

GOOD NEWS for gun rights:

NEW YORK — A federal jury on Wednesday cleared 45 makers and distributors of handguns who were accused of contributing to violence in black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

The suit challenging the companies’ marketing practices was filed by the NAACP.

The jury in New York ruled in favor of the gun makers after five days of deliberations.

Because of the procedural posture of the case, this doesn’t actually put it to bed, but it’s still good news. Then there’s this:

The Republican-controlled House will not renew the federal ban on Uzis and other semiautomatic weapons, a key leader said yesterday, dealing a significant blow to the campaign to clamp down on gun sales nationwide.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) said most House members are willing to let the ban expire next year. “The votes in the House are not there” to continue the ban, he told reporters.

His spokesman, Stuart Roy, said, “We have no intention of bringing it up” for a vote. . . .

In May 1994, the Democratic-controlled House passed the Clinton-backed gun ban by two votes. A few months later, House Speaker Thomas Foley (Wash.), Judiciary Committee Chairman Jack Brooks (Tex.) and several other Democrats who supported the ban were voted out of office after the NRA and other gun activists targeted them in a political campaign.

The NRA’s power ebbed and flowed throughout the rest of the 1990s, hitting a high-water mark after Gore’s narrow loss in 2000. Gore lost gun rights bastions such as Arkansas, West Virginia and his home state of Tennessee, in part, some Democratic analysts believe, because he was seen as hostile to gun owners. In this year’s first debate among Democratic presidential hopefuls, only Al Sharpton vigorously endorsed the registration and licensing of handguns.

Dodd Harris still thinks that Bush has blown it on this one, though, by claiming to support an extension of the ban. This won’t make the antis happy enough to matter, and it’s irritated a lot of supporters. Plus, saying you’ll support a bill because you expect your colleagues to keep it from reaching the floor seems, well, almost Clintonian.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s more background from Dave Kopel.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Jacob Sullum notes that the judge, Jack Weinstein, was “hand-picked” by the plaintiffs.

I’M BUSY GRADING (UGH.) But Phil Carter has lots of stuff that you ought to read, even though it’s not all that cheerful.

This article on Arab responses to the terror attacks, on the other hand, is cheerful, or at least cheering.

WELL, THIS was only a matter of time.

DISTRIBUTED NEWSGATHERING: This story about a Korean news service integrating “citizen reporters” into its operation is cool.

(Via Hit and Run).

DELLWATCH: Last summer, longtime readers may recall, I had some problems with Dell’s service. Now I’ve got a guy scheduled to come replace a dead DVD-burner drive. The phone interaction was easy and good. I’ll let you know if he shows up.

MARK STEYN FIRED? I don’t do guest posts here except in times of grave national, or global, emergency. This may be one of those times. Below is a post from Tim Blair, who for the usual reasons can’t get it to post to his Blogger-powered site: [begin Blair post]

WHAT KIND of idiot newspaper editor would fire Mark Steyn? Apparently the kind who now edits the National Post. Below, a series of answers from Steyn to readers asking if he has, in fact, been sacked:

Obviously it would be highly inappropriate for me to comment on internal matters at the National Post, but as a general observation I would say that the new owners’ penchant for big dramatic public gestures has not served them well. There is no reason to believe this latest one will prove any more successful than their disastrous public downsizing of the Post’s arts and sports coverage after 9/11.

Obviously it would be highly inappropriate for me to comment on internal matters at the National Post, but as a general observation let me observe that at the time Conrad Black sold a half-share in the Post to the Aspers the paper was neck and neck with The Globe And Mail in circulation – there was, as often happens in media markets that have been somnolent for years, a lag between sales and revenue: advertisers are often slower to pick up on things than readers. Making the product weaker editorially is unlikely to solve this problem.

Obviously it would be highly inappropriate for me to comment on internal matters at the National Post, but as a general observation I would note that in the first week of the new puppet regime there does seem to be a marked Paul Martinization of the paper. If that’s what David Asper means by a “strong conservative voice”, it would seem to me that that’s highly unlikely to do anything for the Post’s commercial viability, given the already crowded market of Liberal cheerleaders.

Obviously it would be highly inappropriate for me to comment on internal matters at the National Post, but as a general observation I would say papers should avoid relaunches that give the appearance that the pre-existing paper had got it all wrong. That tends to drive away old readers without attracting new ones. See The Independent.

Obviously it would be highly inappropriate for me to comment on internal matters at the National Post, but as a general observation I would say that that new editor’s “letter to his readers” the Friday after the coup was laughably lame, and to avoid all mention of his predecessors looks not just graceless and petty but extremely insecure.

Obviously it would be highly… aw, never mind.

[End Blair post].

Obviously, the folks at the National Post are blithering idiots to even consider letting go of Mark Steyn. I’m sure that Steyn will continue to prosper. I have my doubts about the National Post.

UPDATE: Charles Johnson says this is the dumbest journalistic personnel move since Jayson Blair was hired by the Times.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Okay, now I have an email, forwarded by a third party but purportedly from the National Post, saying that Steyn hasn’t been fired. Hey, Mark, what’s going on?

SUSANNAH BRESLIN WANTS TO change the spelling of POMO to F-U-N — which should be quite the challenge — and she wants you to help. Oh, and there’s a book-promotion thing going on, too.

TOM PAINE.COM HAS A BLOG NOW. Check it out — it’s LeftyLicious!

UPDATE: Bryan Preston says they should drop the anonymity, and cites Reason’s “Hit and Run” as an example. That’s good advice. Ditto for NRO’s “The Corner,” which is the liveliest in-house blog of all, in no small part because of the personalities — which wouldn’t shine through in an anonyblog. I’ll bet a blog with bylines would draw more readers.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Kaus agrees about the anonymous part, and suggests that TomPaine.com could play an InstaPundit-like role for the left. That would be a good thing. Can TomPaine be quirky enough? If it’s a group-blog, and it’s allowed to, yes. I’m not sure that any individual person over there can match me in quirks (I contain multitudes — of quirks), but then, I don’t know ’em all. . . .

DAVID WARREN SAYS that Salam Pax is a Ba’athist and that his blog shouldn’t be trusted.

(Via Occam’s Toothbrush.)

UPDATE: Roger Simon thinks he’s right.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Lots of interesting discussion in the comments here.

And Bryan Preston notes that he was raising these questions yesterday.

BLOG MELA is the Carnival of the Vanities for Indian Bloggers. Or some such. Anyway, it’s here this week. Check it out for Indian bloggy goodness.

PONTIFEX HAS SOME THOUGHTS ON WOMEN IN COMBAT:

Let’s be blunt. Co-ed bootcamp is asking for trouble. Lowering standards to accomodate females is wrong.

But its a reality that females are going to play a role in our all-volunteer military for the foreseeable future.

What we saw in this war wasn’t that females were closer to the front-lines; what we’re seeing is the eroding away of the rear echelon. With ballistic missiles and mad-dash supply chains, not to mention the increasing reliance on air supremacy, all kinds of people who aren’t infantry or in direct support of a line unit are still crossing into harm’s way.

The Marines have an answer to that, and in fact they always have: “Every Marine a rifleman.” Toting iron doesn’t make you a grunt, but everyone from cooks to boxkickers are expected to be able to engage the enemy if necessary. That’s our mentality, our ethos. And if you’ve got females kicking boxes or making chow, then damn it, they’re Marines too.

[Boxkickers? Supply bubbas. And if you’ll note, the females who got the most attention in this war were in billets like supply, motor transport, etc. That’s no small thing — the supply chain on the drive to Baghdad was one of the most crucial parts of the war.]

I could go on, but I’d be belaboring the point, I think.

And Sgt. Mom responds to Phyllis Schlafly:

I’d be inclined to take her concerns seriously were she to demonstrate a grasp of the difference between “combat” and “combat support”.

The rise of terrorism has perhaps blurred the distinction slightly, in that cooks, admin clerks and mechanics are slightly more inclined to be casualties than once was assumed. But then we once assumed that civilian status offered some sort of protection. This distinction has been in tatters since 9/11.

The women she is voicing her concern about are soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen. They may be officers or NCOs or junior enlisted. They are volunteers and skilled professionals and to consider them in any other light is infantilizing and demeaning. They have all made choices, and I would do them the honor of assuming they made them freely, and with their eyes open, as I did myself.

If you want to do womankind a service, Phyllis, sweetie, go back to complaining about the unisex bathroom thing. I’ve had to share facilities with guys, sometimes, and believe me; some of them couldn’t hit the ground with their hat, much less the commode with a stream of pee.

Funny — I never heard anyone complain about that on Ally McBeal.

I SHOULD PROBABLY JUST WRITE A SCRIPT that would automatically post these words every weekday at 12:01 AM. But anyway, go read Lileks. Today’s an especially good one.

MORE TEETERING DOMINOS in the mideast?

GABRIEL SYME HAS A QUESTION FOR THE ANTI-WAR PROTESTERS, engendered by the finding of mass graves in Iraq. And don’t miss Perry De Havilland’s observation in the comments.

MONICA LEWINSKY AND STEPHEN GLASS: Matt Labash finds a connection.

ALPHECCA’S WEEKLY SURVEY OF MEDIA GUN BIAS IS UP. He finds rather a lot of it over the past week.

Meanwhile Tom Perry has a lengthy and thoughtful discussion of campus gun bans. And Dave Kopel reports from Britain, where the government’s biggest concern seems to be making sure that people don’t resist crime too vigorously.

RELIGION AND SCIENCE FICTION: My TechCentralStation column, which is Matrix-related, is up. I wish that this piece by Adam Gopnik from The New Yorker had been up when I wrote it. I’m not sure I buy the Catharist angle, but it’s interesting. My favorite quote, though, is here:

The only thing setting Zion apart from the good-guy planets in “The Phantom Menace” or “Star Trek” is that it seems to have been redlined at some moment in the mythic past and is heavily populated by people of color. They are all, like Morpheus, grave, orotund, and articulate to the point of prosiness, so that official exchanges in Zion put one in mind of what it must have been like at a meeting at the Afro-American Studies department at Harvard before Larry Summers got to it. (And no sooner has this thought crossed one’s mind when—lo! there is Professor Cornel West himself, playing one of the Councillors.)

Heh. Of course, there’s a certain pot-and-kettle quality to charges of bloviation coming from Gopnik. On the other hand, Emmanuelle Richard loved the film, though she agrees there’s too much speechifying. And Sgt. Stryker says that Agent Smith should worry about the RIAA more than Neo.

UPDATE: 20,000 Canadians say they’re Jedis.

I’m guessing that Chretien isn’t one of them.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Justin Katz thinks I’m wrong — but I think it’s because he expects more of religion than I do.

JEFF JARVIS HAS A MUST-READ COLUMN ON WEBLOGS AND IRAN. So, er, go read it.

NOW IT’S A SHAFER VS. SULLIVAN CAGE MATCH! Sullivan wins this one handily (1) by quoting Shafer’s boss back at him (nice touch!) and (2) because Shafer’s title — “Defending Howell Raines: He didn’t catch Jayson Blair. You didn’t either.” — is so mind-bogglingly dumb. (Of course, that’s probably not Shafer’s fault — titles usually aren’t the author’s idea. But it’s still dumb.)

No, I didn’t catch Jayson Blair. But it was Howell Raines’ job, not mine, to do so, and he had plenty of warning. Solution: The Times should pay Raines as much as it pays me!

Actually, I think that may be coming. . . .

UPDATE: Andy Freeman emails on the catching-Jayson-Blair angle:

Are you sure? That is, you may not have personally caught Blair, but who did?

The first that I saw of the story was some blogger commenting on the similarity between Blair’s work and that of a real journalist

Yes, I know that one of the folks associated with a plagarized party had complained months earlier, but nothing happened.

However, a couple of days after I saw the blogger comment (which may have quoted the complaining journalist), the Blair story started to get traction.

One of the traditional roles of “the media” is to put a spotlight on things. The NYT, for example, isn’t the first to break most stories, but measures its worth by the spotlight effect.

Bloggers are a lot of competition for that role.

I actually don’t think that blogs have played much of a role in this particular process — except, perhaps, in keeping the Times’ justifications under skeptical scrutiny. But I could be wrong, I guess.

VIRGINIA POSTREL says I should remind people of the tipjar regularly. So consider yourself reminded!

MISSING TOURISTS UPDATE: Some of them have been freed. But there’s no information on who was holding them, or why.

(Via PrestoPundit).

UPDATE: This story says they were rescued from an “Al-Qaida linked terror group.”

In the Algerian capital Wednesday, the Army said the Salafist Group for Call and Combat was responsible for taking the travelers hostage, the official news agency APS reported. The group is on the U.S. State Department’s list of terror organizations.

Algerian news reports have said three Saudi envoys of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden met with a top leader of the Salafist Group in December.

I can’t say I’m surprised, and I wonder what else is going on down there.

I DON’T KNOW WHO THESE PEOPLE ARE, but they’re mad at NPR’s mideast coverage, and they’re protesting it in quite a few cities today.

MATTHEW HOY WONDERS IF THE NEW YORK TIMES’ NEW ARCHIVING POLICY is designed to frustrate fact-checking.

I think a more, not less, liberal archive policy is called for under the circumstances.

UPDATE: Drudge reports that two more New York Times reporters are being investigated.

Open the archives! Mr. Raines, tear down that firewall!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Richard Bennett observes:

The media establishment has told us that responsible news organizations are more reliable than the blogs because of all these editors and fact-checkers, but who seriously believes that a blogger doing what Blair did could have survived more than a few months without being caught out? I sure don’t.

Bloggers have open archives, too.

INTERESTING STUFF FROM THE ARAB NEWS, courtesy of an alert reader. First there’s this piece:

Who are we trying to fool? Ourselves or the international community? Neither can be fooled.

It’s about time we got our act together. The time of pretending that radicalism does not exist in Saudi Arabia is long past. The time for pretending that we are above errors and could not possibly commit terrorist attacks is no longer with us. It has got to stop. Change must come now. We as a nation cannot afford to leave it to its own slow pace. It’s either now or never. It also must cover all aspects of our life — the school, the mosque, the home, the street, the media.

How can we tell the rest of the world that we are tolerant of other religions and faiths when some of us are not even tolerant of other schools of Islamic thought?

How can we expect others to believe that a majority of us are a peace-loving people who denounce extremism and terrorism when some preachers continue to call for the destruction of Jews and Christians, blaming them for all the misery in the Islamic world? . . .

We needed to hear three questions that are never asked. Like dust, they are swept under the carpet: Why are more and more Saudi young men being fed with radical ideas? Who are the people brainwashing them? How are they being radicalized?

And so it happens that so much dust is swept underneath the carpet that it finally bursts out in full view of everybody. At last, the truth that was hidden has come out.

And then, there’s this:

It goes without saying that those responsible, those who poisoned the minds of the bombers, those who are planning to become bombers, must be tracked down and crushed — remorselessly and utterly. But crushing them will not be enough. The environment that produced such terrorism has to change. The suicide bombers have been encouraged by the venom of anti-Westernism that has seeped through the Middle East’s veins, and the Kingdom is no less affected. Those who gloat over Sept. 11, those who happily support suicide bombings in Israel and Russia, those who consider non-Muslims less human than Muslims and therefore somehow disposable, all bear part of the responsibility for the Riyadh bombs.

We cannot say that suicide bombings in Israel and Russia are acceptable but not in Saudi Arabia. The cult of suicide bombings has to stop. So too has the chattering, malicious, vindictive hate propaganda. It has provided a fertile ground for ignorance and hatred to grow.

Interesting reaction.