IS PRESIDENT BUSH GOING TO ENDORSE EXTENDING THE ASSAULT WEAPON BAN? That’s what this story says.

Sounds like a good way to be a one-termer, to me.

UPDATE: Rand Simberg thinks it’s safe for Bush, as the extension is unlikely to pass:

So it’s probably a safe position to take. He can make himself look moderate to the moderates, while still allowing the thing to die, thus pleasing his gun rights constituency.

Well, maybe. It seems a bit, well, Clintonian to me.

ANOTHER UPDATE: John Tabin thinks I’m wrong, too. He doesn’t think this has a lot of political traction.

He may be right, of course — but I’ve gotten a lot of angry email about this, copied from gun-rights lists, that suggests that the gun-activist constituency is already pretty upset about it. They also think that Bush has been all talk, no action, on the Ashcroft Second Amendment strategy (and they’re clearly right about that). So if those people get mad will they stay home? Maybe. If they do will it cost Bush some states? Maybe. Can he afford to lose those states? Maybe. Is he smart to take that chance? At best, maybe. Anyway, here’s what I wrote when this was first rumored, back on Sept, 8, 2001.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Mike McDaniel writes:

think that Bush and Rove have miscalculated the brittleness of their support from gun owners. Gun owners have become very watchful for the knife in the back – so much so that many regard betrayal as inevitable. Trust has to be earned, and Bush has provided little more than lip service.

The Republican Party tends to forget that every election in the last fifteen years that they fought with NRA support was a victory – and every election without NRA support was a defeat. Sooner or later, the people they keep stabbing in the back will walk out and STAY out – or the Democrats will figure out that a slightly better offer (which would not have to be much) would turn gun owners on THEIR side, smashing the Republicans’ chances for decades to come.

We’ll have to see. But Bush needs to take care – he is horribly vulnerable on the right. The Democrats can’t do it, but a conservative Republican could easily. . .

He needs to stop pandering to his opponents and start mending some fences.

I think that there’s a significant group of people who feel this way, and that McDaniel is right — their support is brittle, and they’re hypersensitive about betrayal, because they’ve been betrayed so many times.

THE BBC IS UNDER ATTACK AGAIN, but in a different sort of way:

The latest high court challenge to the BBC’s licence fee began today with a 60 year old Oxfordshire man claiming the annual charge is a breach of his human rights.

Jean-Jacques Marmont, who was prosecuted for licence fee evasion in 1992, has launched proceedings against the BBC, representing a group of licence-fee payers.

He argues the licence fee breaches the European convention and UK Human Rights Act and amounts to harassment and an infringement on his private and family life.

But his action is just one of several legal rows the BBC is facing over the £116 fee.

His effort joins at least three other court actions, including one involving Sunday Times columnist Jonathan Miller.

All of the legal actions argue that the licence fee contravenes article 10 of the European convention on human rights.

What do you say when the BBC runs afoul of the Eurocracy? Oh, yeah: “Heh.”

HERE’S A PRETTY DETAILED ACCOUNT of how Joe Biden’s dumb and un-American “RAVE Act” became law — with the assistance of some others whose names should live in infamy:

A Democrat, Senator Joe Biden (DE), (pictured left) introduced the RAVE–Reducing American’s Vulnerability to Ecstasy–Act in the Senate in 2002. Biden’s RAVE Act was co-sponsored by Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Charles Grassley (R-IA), Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) and Strom Thurmond (R-NC).

Shame.

UPDATE: I didn’t notice in the passage quoted above, but Thurmond should be R-SC, not NC. Saw what I expected to see, instead of what was really there, and didn’t even notice the error when I pasted it in.

JEFF JARVIS WRITES: “It’s bad when you can fisk a headline.”

“THE MOST HATED PROFESSOR IN AMERICA” — that’s the title of this Chronicle of Higher Education interview with Columbia professor Nicholas De Genova of “million Mogadishu” fame.

Daniel Drezner has this comment:

I found the entire exchange hysterical — it basically consists of the interviewer asking reasoned questions, De Genova popping off an irrelevant or incoherent answer, and the interviewer having to gently re-ask the question.

Irrelevant and incoherent. That’s what it’s all about with these guys.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh asks:

What in heaven’s name do the actions of a warlord in Mogadishu have to do with decisionmaking “by the Somali people,” or “human self-determination”? What did the Saddam regime have to do with “human self-determination”? The U.S. invasion at least yields some possible hope that the Iraqi people will determine for themselves who will govern them — the Saddam regime offered no such hope.

Or does “self-determination” by “[a country’s] people” somehow mean “decision by [the country’s] warlord,” on the theory that he somehow innately represents the people whom he is ruling by force? And this representation must obviously flow just from ethnic connection, since there’s no other foundation through which he’s a more suitable ruler than, say, you or I.

So does “self-determination” boil down to “One folk, one ruler, one party?” Or is De Genova just spouting a load of nonsense that boils down to “U.S. bad, anyone else good!”?

UPDATE: Here’s more on De Genova from The Filibuster, which notes that De Genova appears to be accusing Eric Foner of pro-war McCarthyism.

THE MOTHER OF ALL WEBLOGGERS:

Guess who’s running of one of the hottest Web logs about the war in Iraq, updated constantly with TV, radio and newspaper reports.

A policy wonk sitting in Washington? A techno-geek in a converted Silicon Alley garage?

Would you believe Michele Catalano, a Long Island mother of two?

There’s a lot more about The Command Post, and other blogs.

COSMO MACERO WRITES IN THE BOSTON HERALD that CNN has handed Fox a huge leg up in the ratings wars — and that it deserves the problems it will face as a result of its Iraq coverage:

The explosive growth in broadcast, cable and Internet news sources since the first Gulf War has proven that consumers have a refined taste for information. They recognize quality in news brands in the way they recognize quality in consumer products.

So any event that inflicts damage to the brand is bound to have a lasting impact.

This is why Jordan’s admission, while commendable for its honesty, may be the start of a new credibility crisis for CNN, rather than just the end of his personal nightmare of bottled-up guilt.

“Years after consumers have forgotten the facts of the case, they may still look at your brand . . . and feel that something is distasteful there,” wrote David D’Alessandro, John Hancock Financial Services Inc.’s chief executive, in his 2001 marketing book “Brand Warfare.”

“It can take 100 years to build a good brand and 30 days of bad publicity to destroy it,” he wrote.

The risk for CNN: that too many viewers, with plenty of alternatives to choose from, will make rash but understandable judgments such as: “Those guys bury stories they don’t want to tell,” or, “CNN stands for Careful News Network – as in, `Be careful not to anger any dictators.’ ”

After all, Eason Jordan is top-tier management at CNN. His decisions can’t be dismissed as the errors of one renegade staffer. They are, quite to the contrary, bedrock company policy.

The fallout is already perceptible: on the letters page of the Times; among the growing legion of media watchers on the Internet; and even, to some degree, on CNN’s own telecasts.

Sounds fair to me. (The Herald is a paid link, but Macero sent me the column. Why in God’s name is The Herald limiting its web content to subscribers?)

SO I’M FEELING SLIGHTLY GUILTY about not blogging much on the weekend, and getting off to a late start today, when I look over at Andrew Sullivan’s site and see that he’s taking “Spring Break.” Enjoy it, Andrew!

LEE HARRIS WRITES:

It is one of the most difficult things for us to understand about those who are in the grips of a collective fantasy—how even the most powerful, the most irrefutable evidence will be ignored and suppressed in order to keep the fantasy intact.

And this is the greatest danger confronting the American mission to bring sanity to the Arab world—it may not want it.

This is why the next couple of days and weeks will be so critical for us and for the world.

If the collective Arab mind decides that the fall of Baghdad came about because a corrupt dictator had lost the loyalty of the people whom he had brutalized for thirty years, then sanity may begin to emerge. But if, on the other hand, this same collective mind begins to look for another consoling myth, it is sure to find one readily available. And if you doubt this, simply recall the Arab theories of 9/11.

Indeed. Read the whole thing.

HMM — first various documents start leaking out of Baghdad, implicating the Russians in violations of U.N. sanctions, and perhaps worse. Now we get this:

The anti-war coalition of France, Germany and Russia seemed to be crumbling yesterday after President Vladimir Putin put out a series of conciliatory signals to America.

Senior Russian officials told the Izvestia daily newspaper that the Kremlin has “no illusions about any long-term perspectives for the axis”. One official said: “Sooner or later Iraq will fall and Russia and the United States will resume normal relations.”

The source added that Russia never expected any long-term principled position from either France or Germany.

“The Axis?” What I like best about this quote is that even its members seem to think of it as the “Axis of Weasels.”

UPDATE: Here’s more:

A summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his French and German counterparts has been dubbed a failure by some officials here, who warned the troika’s “peace camp” alliance would crumble with the end of the war in Iraq. . . .

Putin is still pushing to protect a nascent friendship with US President George W. Bush in the face of strident opposition from the Russian media and top government officials. Analysts have long argued that Putin is far keener to preserve friendly ties with the United States than with the pro-European, anti-war camps embedded in much of the Russian media and the foreign and defense ministries.

The story (from Riyadh Daily) even reports that Putin is willing to forgive some Iraqi debts in the interest of good relations with the United States. How much should we make of these stories? Beats me, but it sure doesn’t sound like a united front.

ALGERIAN TOURIST UPDATE: According to this report in The Telegraph, Algerian officials say that the missing Sahara tourists have been kidnapped, and are alive. The article seems to suggest that armed Islamic radicals are behind it (no!) though it doesn’t quite come right out and say that.

I think there are a lot of interesting things going on in that part of the world, that perhaps bear closer attention.