MARK KLEIMAN EMAILS THAT HE’S “FISKING” ME for linking to a piece by Tony Adragna. In “Fisking,” however, it’s generally considered a major failure when you misspell the name of your major source, as Kleiman does when he repeatedly refers to “Tony Andragna.” Especially when you do so in the process of accusing someone of carelessness.

So in answer to Mark’s question: “When is the Titan of the Blogosphere going to start to hold himself to the same standards of accurate reporting he expects of the New York Times or the BBC?” — the answer is: when you do, Mark!

But where both Mark and I are ahead of the NYT and the BBC is that both my brief item, and Mark’s much, much longer one, contain links to the original documents in question, letting readers decide for themselves whether we’ve gotten it right.

On substance — now that my snarking is out of the way — Kleiman’s right. My link was too hasty, and somewhat overstated the import of the Adragna post. (I suspect I was influenced in this by the email that I got containing the link, but that’s neither here nor there; and Kleiman hasn’t refuted the post, either.) But those who followed the link, as Mark did, got to decide for themselves. And that’s where blogging is different from old media. The other nice thing about blogging is that you can also correct your errors, as I’m sure Mark will do pronto. And perhaps next time — having already once accused me of deliberately inserting a bad link in a piece because he carelessly failed to notice that the piece was a year old — Mark will be a little more careful himself, or at least a bit less quick to impute bad faith in cases of carelessness.

UPDATE: Mark Kleiman has fixed his mistake — see, that was fast — and says that I’m “thin-skinned.” Hmm. I presumed that the email was intended to evoke a response. Should I just delete this post, then?

As for his question of whether I approve of hostage-taking, the answer is no. But it’s not clear what happened in this case and, frankly, there’s been so much wolf-crying and outright lying about U.S. “war crimes” that it has become very difficult for me to take those charges seriously.

Now I’m not an empirical guy, but somebody should do an experiment: write the New York Times or the BBC about a headline that you think is misleading, and see if you get a response this quickly. . . .

And the point isn’t that I — or, I think, any blogger — is holding him- or herself out as better than these Big Media oufits. Rather, we wonder why they aren’t better than they are, given how many more resources they’ve got.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Tom Maguire calls my defense here “timid and ineffectual.” Well, that’s just how I am, I guess. Those are not, however, words that anyone would apply to Maguire.

TREASURY’S ABOUT-FACE ON SAUDI MONEY: I’d really like to know what’s going on here:

The Treasury Department said yesterday that it would decline to provide the Senate with a list of Saudi individuals and organizations the federal government has investigated for possibly financing Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

The action was the second in two weeks to set the White House and Congress at odds about the Saudis and federal intelligence-gathering related to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Moreover, the move contradicted an assertion made on Thursday by a senior Treasury official, Richard Newcomb, who told the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in a hearing on Saudi sponsorship of terrorism that the list was not classified and that his agency would turn it over to the Senate within 24 hours.

I still don’t understand why the Democrats aren’t making a bigger issue of this stuff.

UPDATE: Reader Harry Helms emails:

Answer: because if the Saudi government provided financial, organization, and/or logistical support for the September 11 attacks, that constitutes an act of war against the United States by a foreign nation and the American people will demand military action against Saudi Arabia.

And most elected Democrats are so far into the “no war is ever justified” mindset they can’t risk making an issue of the increasingly clear Saudi connection to 9/11; they correctly sense most Americans wouldn’t be satisfied with a formal condemnation of Saudi Arabia by the United Nations.

I feel the Bush administration is well aware of the Saudi links to 9/11, and is merely waiting until Iraqi oil is at full production and suitable replacement custodians for Mecca and Medina are aboard (Jordan’s Hashemites?) until moving against the House of Saud. 2005 might be a very interesting year for the Saud royal family.

I hope he’s right about the Administration, and I’d be disappointed to think that he’s right about the Democrats. As for the Hashemite idea, well, where have we heard that before?

UPDATE: Chuck Schumer, who as I mentioned earlier might be a bellwether on this issue, has now released a letter cosigned Sam Brownback and by a bunch of Democratic Senators, calling for release of the censored pages about Saudi involvement in 9/11. (Via Kleiman.)

A MAN DEFENDS HIMSELF from gun-firing drug dealers. The police say he hasn’t committed any crime — but they confiscate his guns anyway. Publicola and Rachel Lucas are unhappy.

Police are rather free about confiscating guns — and, as any lawyer who deals with such matters can attest, often refuse to return them even when they have no legal basis for keeping them. (What’s more, those confiscated guns often “disappear” and wind up in the hands of . . . . police officers!)

The police chief here, Reuben Greenberg, is well-regarded, which makes it likely that either there’s more to this story than has been reported, or that swift corrective action will be taken. Stay tuned.

WHAT IF YOU HELD A CALIFORNIA BOND SALE and nobody came?

MORE DOMESTIC TERRORISM:

SAN DIEGO, Aug. 4 — Dozens of investigators on Monday were probing a $20 million arson that appears to be the work of the Earth Liberation Front. If front activists are responsible, it would be the costliest attack ever by environmental extremists.

Funny: The Earth Liberation Front has an arson manual on the front page of its website, but this guy got sent to jail for simply linking to sites with bomb-building information. How come the ELF site is still in operation? Do environmental terrorists get some sort of pass?

In my opinion, linking to bomb-making sites shouldn’t be a crime, and punishing someone for doing so is a First Amendment violation. But at least one District Judge apparently disagrees.

UPDATE: Bill Hobbs has more on domestic terrorism.

THE MENTOS CONSPIRACY: I knew it had to be something like this.

HERE’S AN UPDATE ON THE X-PRIZE COMPETITION for private spaceflight:

The award – which is vying for a place among the aviation prizes of the early 20th century that propelled major advances in speed, distance and technology – has sparked a space quest akin to the great race for flight in the early 1900s that drew in European and American inventors, including bicycle mechanics Orville and Wilbur Wright of Dayton, Ohio.

A century later, garage rocket scientists across four continents heed the call, joined by notables such as missile pioneer Robert C. Truax and aircraft designer Burt Rutan. At its current pace, X Prize officials say, the award could be won by December, in time for the 100th anniversary of the Wrights’ Kitty Hawk flight.

Ultimately, the prize aims to do for spaceships what the Orteig Prize did for airplanes.

I remember when this idea was first floated. It’s done quite well.

LILEKS’ SITE IS STILL DOWN, but Kim du Toit is — well, in Hollywood they’d call it paying homage. Somehow, though, it’s just not quite the same. . . .

Best bit: “No .22 ammo there either. Not even a lousy box of the Federal 500-in-a-carton crap which clogs the innards of the Marlin like gum in the Mac hard drive (don’t ask).” If Lileks wrote stuff like this, he’d write, er, stuff like this.

DAMIAN PENNY ASKS: “Am I alone in thinking this story – that the former President of South Korea effectvely bought himself a Nobel Peace Prize by funnelling millions of dollars to the world’s most insane dictator – should be getting a lot more attention?”

Why no, Damian. You’re not.

WANT TO INTERVIEW UT LAW STUDENTS? If you’re a law firm in New York City, UT will come to you.

WHICH IS MORE DAMNING? If Tony Auth didn’t realize that his work was virtually identical to a Nazi cartoon, or if he did?

DANIEL DREZNER HAS SOME OBSERVATIONS on reform of higher education in Iraq.

CONDI FOR VICE PRESIDENT, Dick Cheney for Secretary of State: The ducks are lining up.

WHO IS SCARED OF HOWARD DEAN? A lot of people, all of a sudden, it seems. At least, I turned on the radio while driving around this afternoon, and heard Rush Limbaugh dumping heavily on Dean and saying that (1) Democrats are scared of Bush because his relatively big-government policies (which Limbaugh compared to Nixon’s) are stealing their issues; and (2) Dean’s too far to the left to win.

I’m not so sure. Bush’s comparatively liberal spending policies are alienating a nontrivial number of his supporters, but will they win Democratic votes? Bush talks a somewhat better game on guns than Dean, but not much better, and his actual actions on that front haven’t been especially impressive. DoJ is still defending the D.C. gun ban, which seems to conflict rather clearly with its interpretation of the Second Amendment, nor, to my knowledge, is the new interpretation affecting actual policy around the country. Will some GOP supporters conclude that there’s not that much difference between them?

The biggest difference between them is the war. That’ll help Bush unless the war either goes so well that it drops out of public consciousness, or so badly that Dean looks good. The latter isn’t likely, though I suppose it’s possible. The former seems somewhat more likely, though by no means assured.

But although Democrats’ claims about the “Bush deficit” aren’t getting a lot of traction — nobody takes the Dems seriously on the restraining-spending issue — Bush’s big-spending ways are probably demoralizing a lot of people who supported him as a smaller-government Republican. It’s worth remembering that Nixon’s foray into big-government led to the creation of the Libertarian Party, a split that has cost the GOP some close races. Does Bush want to be remembered (even by Republicans) as the next Nixon?

On the other hand, Nixon was re-elected in a landslide against an antiwar Democrat. . . .

UPDATE: Doc Searls thinks that lefty electoral-bloggers are taking the kind of lead that warbloggers took on, well, the war. He may be right.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Devereaux Cannon emails:

For what it is worth–today I saw my first Democrat presidential bumper sticker for the 2004 election (discounting the “re-elect Gore in ’04” stickers). On my way into Nashville this morning I passed a Mercedes sporting a Howard Dean for President sticker.

I’ve seen a Kerry and an Edwards, but no Deans so far.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Gerard Van Der Leun thinks that Howard Dean is the beneficiary of blogosphere narcissism.

Well, hey, but if that gets you on the cover of Time and Newsweek, then . . . .

THIS ABUSE OF ANTITERROR LAWS is unpatriotic, because it perverts a vital part of national defense.

The prosecutor in question, Jerry Wilson of Watauga County, North Carolina, should be ashamed. He should also be out of a job.

JIM BENNETT HAS A COLUMN ON THE TERROR-FUTURES IDEA:

More frightening than the demise of the program, however, was the manner of its demise. Not only have we been deprived of the information the program would have given us, but we have sent a powerful message to those on the front lines of defense against terror. That message is “Don’t think. Don’t Innovate. Don’t take risks.” It’s not as if these characteristics have been so predominant in the civil service that we can afford to suppress them gratuitously.

Yeah.

I BOUGHT THE RX-8 ON THURSDAY. It then rained every day. Today the weather was perfect, so after going in to the office and doing a couple of things that had to be done today, I took off and went to the mountains, driving on the Foothills Parkway, hiking up to the Look Rock fire tower, etc. It was great, and made me wonder why I don’t do that more often — I’m close enough to do it on a long lunch. (The RX-8 is great. Full report later.)

When I got home, the blow-off gods had punished me, as the DSL was out. So I’m working at Borders, which now has wireless Internet. [So how does this count as being “punished?” — Ed. My cappucino is a bit too frothy. . . .]

More later.

NORMAN GERAS’S BLOG POST on the antiwar left, popular throughout the blogosphere, has made the WSJ OpinionJournal.

STANDARDS ARE SHIFTING: The New York Times has long been known for lifting stories from smaller papers. But in the wake of the Blair scandals, it’s news:

John Sutter, publisher of the Villager, says the New York Times has been stealing story ideas from his small Greenwich Village paper. There’s no hint of plagiarism here; in each case, Times staffers did their own reporting and filed stories that read very differently. And it’s hardly unusual for big-city papers, including The Washington Post, to follow up on reports in smaller community papers.

But in this case there appears to be a pattern of lifting ideas without credit.

Sutter cited 32 articles over the last three years on subjects that appeared first in the Villager. In 11 cases, one or more people quoted by the Villager are also quoted in the subsequent Times piece.

Now that this sort of thing is easier to check and to point out, I suspect that smaller papers will be more insistent on credit.

FLASH MOBS come to Boston!

INTERESTING CHRIS BERTRAM INTERVIEW with Michael Walzer. Walzer proves that it was possible to thoughtfully oppose the Iraq war, even if very few war opponents managed to pull it off. It largely defies excerpting, but here’s good bit: “It can’t be the case that when we try to figure out whether a war is just or unjust, we are predicting how the Council will vote. Indeed, justice would be independent of UN decision-making even if the UN were a global government.”

THIS EDITORIAL in the Christian Science Monitor takes the Bush Administration to task for its handling of terrorist prosecutions to date. Meanwhile this column by Jacob Sullum takes the government to task for its “enemy combatant” detentions.

As Virginia Postrel notes:

In my mind, the single most important guide to security policy is that the government must never have the right to hold individuals within the United States, particularly (but not exclusively) citizens, secretly or incommunicado. That power inevitably turns first into the power to torture, and eventually into the power to detain and torture people whose danger to the general population is far less than their danger to the decision-making officials.

She’s absolutely right, of course. Sadly, the Bush Administration’s best friends in all this are those who have repeatedly cried wolf, and who now cast Bush as Hitler, thus discrediting the more serious civil libertarians who raise valid concerns like these.

UPDATE: Of course, a bigger point is that injustices aren’t limited to the terror war. In fact, they’re endemic.