WHY CARACAS IS better than Berkeley.

JOYCE MALCOLM writes that Britain needs more guns. It’s a good column, but what’s amazing to me is that the BBC is presenting it.

IN WHAT TALKLEFT CALLS “an especially sneaky move,” Senator Tom Daschle has reintroduced the dumb RAVE Act from last year. More information is at TalkLeft, but here’s a link to a column I wrote on the previous version last year. I suspect the new version is even dumber. And it just proves that the Democrats are no better on civil liberties than the Republicans, though that’s certainly nothing for anyone to take satisfaction in.

MEDIA GEEK EVENING: Got home to two messages on the answering machine. One was saying that the New York Times story will run Thursday (hope it’s not like this one), the other was a message asking my wife to appear on Jenny Jones and talk about murderous preteens. (She declined). Then I spent some time fiddling with photos I took for the law school’s new website, and now I’m working on music for her documentary. (The director wants “German industrial” for one scene. . . uh, okay.) Meanwhile my daughter was practicing to play Lousia May Alcott in her school’s biographical show, for which she has a costume (sewn by her grandmother) and a speech (partly written).

Yeah, we’re not like other people. But you knew that.

THOSE WACKY RAELIANS. Nice dig, but it still doesn’t excuse the topknot.

PBS’S MEDIA MATTERS has posted more on blogs and bloggers.

MORE RICIN NEWS:

A DETECTIVE was stabbed to death and another officer was seriously injured when police raided a flat in Manchester last night as part of an investigation into the discovery of the poison ricin. . . .

Three Algerian men were later arrested under anti-terrorism legislation and were being questioned by police last night. Security sources described the arrest of the man they had originally sought as “significant”. One of the men was arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000 and was brought to the high-security wing of Paddington Green police station in London overnight.

I think there’s more to this story than we’ve heard so far. And the Algerian angle is no surprise.

WELL, IT’S ABOUT TIME: This means that I was a hardened criminal for years and never knew it. Thank goodness that’s all in the past now.

NOT MUCH BLOGGING this afternoon. I taught Constitutional Law (the intro survey course) earlier; in a little while I’ll be teaching Advanced Constitutional Law (a seminar actually dealing with state constitutional law, a really interesting subject). Sorry, but the day job does intrude sometimes.

In the meantime, Alphecca has comments on Howard Dean and ballistic registration, along with his weekly summary of pro- and anti-gun slant in the media; Will Tysse is fact-checking the New York Times and praising the good judgment of the U.C. Berkeley administration; and Jim Miller has an interesting story about race, guns, and self-defense. Meanwhile, Orin Kerr has a post on the Supreme Court’s new decision on death and double jeopardy. Back later.

Oh, and Hans Linde’s article, E Pluribus — Constitutional Theory and State Courts, just gets better every time I read it.

UPDATE: Oh, well. I guess taking a few hours off posting helped this happen.

SOME THOUGHTS on the future of journalism from The Last Home.

WILLIAM SJOSTROM has a new, handsome Sekimori-designed blog up at a new URL: it’s AtlanticBlog.Com. Adjust your bookmarks accordingly.

And I guess “handsome Sekimori-designed blog” is a redundancy, isn’t it?

WOULD PEOPLE BE COMPLAINING ABOUT THIS RESEARCH if Bill Frist had taken part?

DONALD LUSKIN joins Mickey Kaus in being unimpressed by the New York Times’ new ethics policy.

MUSLIMPUNDIT ADIL FAROOQ has joined the crowd over at the newly revived Winds of Change. And scroll up from there to read an interesting post by Trent Telenko on new advances in precision weaponry.

MORE REASONS TO DOUBT THE FBI:

Last April, Justice Department officials insisted they needed more information before they could identify a witness, Robert Daddieco, being sought for questioning by the Committee on Government Reform. At the same time, a Justice Department official warned Daddieco – who had been relocated under the federal witness protection program 30 years ago – that the committee wanted to talk to him, according to the draft.

A few days before Daddieco was interviewed by the committee, which was investigating the FBI’s handling of informants in Boston, the FBI offered him $15,000, according to the report. The report references the timing of the payment just before committee staff interviewed Daddieco about alleged misconduct by FBI agents, but does not indicate why the money was offered or whether it was accepted.

And to doubt the Justice Department’s ability — or willingness – to oversee the Bureau.

I PULLED ALMOST 2000 emails off the server last night; about a week’s worth. I read the vast majority of them, but not all — and now that they’ve been sucked into Outlook they’re pretty much gone. I never go back to those, since there are always new ones (about 40 or 50 already) to take their place and it’s hard enough to keep up. I read nearly everything, except when I get behind, and I try (with mixed success) to reply to everything that calls for a reply. But this is a hobby.

Meanwhile some Italian politician is publicly bitching about having 23. Jeff Jarvis tells him where to get off.

BETRAYING THE IRAQI PEOPLE IN THE NAME OF PEACE:

The anti-war movement is a private party. It has proved to be a remarkably fastidious friend of suffering peoples of the Middle East, and its doors are always open to non-Iraqi Muslims – but it’s not at home to Muslims from Iraq.

As far as I can work out from the coalition’s membership list, only two Iraqi organisations – one calling itself the Iraqi Network for Human Rights and a second called the Federation of Kurdish Community Organisations – have signed its manifesto. No Iraqi exile I have interviewed has heard of either.

The truth is that the overwhelming majority of Iraqi dissidents are an embarrassment to the Left. After enduring misery few of us can imagine, they have discovered that, without foreign intervention, their country won’t be freed from a tyrant who matches Stalin in his success in liquidating domestic opponents. Only America can intervene. Therefore an American invasion offers the possibility of salvation.

There’s a damnable logic to this that no amount of wriggling can escape. If you say to the Iraqi opposition that America is very selective in its condemnation of dictatorships, they shrug and ask why Iraqis should care. If you say that Iraq shouldn’t be liberated from Saddam until Palestinians are liberated from Israeli occupation, they ask if the converse also applies. (It never does, incidentally.) They confront the anti-war movement with the disconcerting thought that there are worse things in the world than George W Bush and American imperialism, and Saddam Hussein and his prison state are among them.

To right-thinking, Left-leaning people, such thoughts are not merely disconcerting but unthinkable.

Read the whole thing.

EDWARD BOYD comments on gun-controllers’ renewed efforts to capitalize on the D.C. sniper.

UPDATE: One minor note: the TAPPED post that Boyd criticizes refers to John Muhammad’s Bushmaster as a “high-powered rifle.” It’s not. Rifles firing the .223 cartridge aren’t “high-powered” and calling them that just shows ignorance.

By way of comparison, it’s as if Bill Bennett characterized Pete Townshend’s arrest over child pornography as evidence of the moral degeneracy of “those gangsta rappers.” You can bet that TAPPED would be all over something like that.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails:

Although the .223 is not as powerful as the 30-06, 7.62 X 39 mm, .308, or other military rounds, it is, for all practical purposes, a “high-powered” round. The .223 can penetrate most levels of body armor used by police, it can be deadly up to 500 meters, and it produces 2-3 times more foot-pounds of energy than almost all pistol rounds. In the opinion of the average man-on-the-street, that’s a high-powered bullet.

Well, okay, but by this standard pretty much any rifle bullet is “high-powered,” isn’t it? Which pretty much makes the “high-powered rifle” term redundant. Most discussion I see of the .223 among rifle experts focuses on its relative wimpiness compared to other rifle rounds like the .308, .300 Win. Mag., etc. — and if you showed up at the “high power” range at the shooting range I belong to, you’d be referred elsewhere since it’s for shots of up to 1,000 meters and the .223 is useless at that distance.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Keith Terranova emails:

I think the reader who emailed you about the .223 is stretching the “hire-powered”‘ness of it when he says “it can be deadly up to 500 meters”. The bullet weighs 55 grains compared to 150, 165, 180 for the 30-06 or .308. I have not read one in some years, but the shooting manuals like the Shooter’s Bible offer ranges out to 300 yards and if I remember correctly the bullet drop is a couple of feet.

I think I just hit my gun-geek limit for the day. This isn’t Kim du Toit’s blog, you know. . . .

LAST UPDATE: Okay, I said no more, but Jeff Bishop thinks I’m wrong, too:

I know you’ve already exceeded the gun geek limit, but FYI, the CMP requires you to participate in a “high-powered” rifle match to qualify for an M-1 Garand. I qualified for it using my .223 Mini-14. AFAIK, the .223 is at the very bottom of what qualifies as “high-powered.”

As I replied, all I ever hear from gun people is snideness about the underpowered .223 cartridge. But, there you are.

Reader, Michael Levy, on the other hand, offers this question:

I wonder when the media will start referring to handguns as “low-powered firearms?”

I’m holding my breath on that one, Michael.

RESISTANCE IS FUTILE: Jack Balkin has been assimilated to the Blogosphere.

TRANSPARENCY WORKS BOTH WAYS: And somebody’s figured out how to make a buck off it.

ORSON SCOTT CARD writes on Korea. So does Josh Marshall.

BJORN STAERK is doing radio now.

VEGARD VALBERG says that the press is full of it when reporting that everyone hates America now.

MORE ON THE JAPANESE INTERNMENT AND RELATED MATTERS: Reader Dominic Anghelone sends a bunch of links. Here’s one on the internment of Italians in Britain (actually, this page is about Italians from Scotland) during World War II, some of whom were sent to the Isle of Man and some of whom were sent to Canada, some perishing when their ship was torpedoed by a U-Boat.

There’s also this link to a book about the internment of Italian-Canadians, and this link to a page on forced labor and internment of Ukrainian-Canadians.

Meanwhile, here’s a page on the internment of Germans and Austro-Hungarians in World War One. (Note, however, that these were, for example, German citizens, though sometimes long-term residents, not simply Americans of German descent.)

Finally, here’s a link to a statement by Senator Russ Feingold:

Mr. Chairman, as you know, during World War II, the United States fought the spread of Nazism and fascism. Nazi Germany was engaged in the persecution and genocide of Jews and certain other groups. By the end of the war, six million Jews had perished at the hands of Nazi Germany. Unfortunately, while we were at war with Germany, Italy, and Japan, the United States treated as suspect the Japanese American, German American, and Italian American communities, depriving them of fundamental rights of liberty and due process.

As a nation, we have been slow to study and to acknowledge this conduct. Most Americans are now aware of the U.S. government’s treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Through the work of a commission created by Congress in 1980, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, this disgraceful episode in American history finally received the official acknowledgment and condemnation it deserved.

Thus far, there has not been sufficient study of the injustices suffered by German Americans, Italian Americans and other Americans of European descent during World War II. The U.S. government limited their travel, imposed curfews, and seized their personal property. Thousands were selectively interned in camps – often separated from other members of their family and living in miserable conditions. Approximately 11,000 ethnic Germans living in the United States, 3,200 ethnic Italians, and scores of ethnic Bulgarians, Hungarians, Romanians, and other European Americans were taken from their homes and placed in internment camps. Hundreds were interned for up to three years even after the war had ended. Many of these families, including American children, were later shipped back to war-torn Europe in exchange for Americans held there, and suffered terribly.

In addition, there has been no justice for European Latin Americans – including German and Austrian Jews – who were repatriated or deported to hostile, war-torn European Axis powers, often as part of an exchange for Americans being held in those countries.

And here’s a link to Feingold’s bill from the last Congress, the Wartime Treatment Study Act, that would have required, well, study of what went on along these lines.

Interesting stuff, and touching on events that I was, at best, only vaguely aware of. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of everything in these linked pages, either, though as far as I know they’re accurate.

HERE’S A WEBLOG FOCUSED ON VENEZUELAN POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS that I didn’t know about until today. I love the pictures!

There are more blogs than I can keep track of, these days.

UPDATE: And here’s proof: another Venezuela blog by a (now-ex) stringer for the New York Times, who quit his Times slot rather than take down the blog. A hero of the blogosphere!