LILEKS ISN’T RISING TO MY BAIT, but he has some choice words for The Handmaid’s Tale.

NICK DENTON ON SALAM PAX:

Some smart literary agent should sign up Salam Pax, the anonymous Baghdad blogger, like, now. He’s on the spot; the perspective is unique; and he writes better than most professional writers. This guy’s book is worth six figures, and much of it is already written.

Yep.

GORE VIDAL SUFFERS the world’s first Velveeta Fisking. (It’s sort of like the Velvet Revolution, except not at all.) Tony Adragna performs the honors.

THIS MAY BE THE ULTIMATE WEBLOG TROLL POST. It’s in the top 10, for sure.

JAYSON BLAIR’S NEW GIG is already lined up. That didn’t take long. . . .

UPDATE: And Tim Blair says you should send in your resume, too!

JOE KATZMAN WRITES ON Saddam’s agents of influence. And what to do now.

HENRY FARRELL REPORTS that the government of Spain is, ahem, overreaching in the war against terror. Actually, it sounds like rather more than that.

UPDATE: Reader Franco Aleman says that this story is bogus. He’s got a fairly lengthy comment attached to the post on Farrell’s blog.

JIM MILLER points to a story on what the Lincoln’s sailors thought about Bush’s visit.

NAT HENTOFF WRITES:

After a two-day strike on March 18 and 19—described by The New York Times as “the largest public protest against President Mugabe since he was re-elected last year in a contest that was marred by widespread allegations of fraud”—Mugabe’s enforcers cracked down on his opponents. There were the customary arrests and torturings, as reported in the same New York Times story, in which the dictator crowed about his people’s “happy lot.”

But there are no protests on the streets of America.

No American newspaper, as far as I know, has detailed the torture inflicted on members of the opposition. However, I have “A Report on Organized Violence and Torture in Zimbabwe From 20 to 24 March 2003” from the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition.

No act is too unspeakable to ignore, so long as it isn’t performed by an American, or perhaps an Israeli.

DANIEL DREZNER REPORTS that we’re making progress around the mideast.

FRITZ SCHRANCK ASKS: “You assassinate a few leaders, fire off a couple mortar attacks at some others, and all of a sudden somebody thinks you’re a terrorist organization. What’s up with that?”

ROGER SIMON IS happy about the New York Times scandal — and the CNN scandal, too!

THE SANCTIONS PRETZEL: Pretty sad.

IS THE TSA COOKING THE NUMBERS? Reader Scott Breffle sends this report:

While in the security line at Oakland, CA on Friday, a TSA employee asked me if I could take this yellow card and hand it to the screeners at the front. He explained that they used these cards to time the line. It seemed reasonable and I accepted. Afterwards I more fully read the text on the card. It said that this card was used to time the line and was thanking me, as the last person in the line, for helping the TSA measure how long it is taking to get through the security line. The problem was, I was already half-way through the line! Is an organization so young already stacking the performance metrics? Disappointing, and hopefully an isolated incident.

Interesting. I haven’t heard any other reports like this.

UPDATE: Reader Tucker Goodrich emails:

I recently flew out to San Francisco from Newark and back, and they were polite and efficient, far better than the old regime.

However, they missed my little Swiss Army pocket knife (on my keychain)coming and going. What to make of that?

My last flight was fine on this end (but it always was) but hell at Mineta International in San Jose, which apparently it always is. Meanwhile reader Kevin Rose says:

I was with a tour group going from Albuquerque to Houston, then to Honduras in mid April. Half of us found, on arrival in Honduras, that our dive bags had been unsealed, with the little TSA inspection notices. Not one had the “tamper evident” seals that they claim to have placed on them, they were just zipped shut. Nothing was missing, but you have to wonder if the TSA forgot to budget for cable ties? Is this common?

Beats me. And reader Bob Cady suggests:

Another possibility is that they are giving the card to (say) the 10th person in line to measure scanning rate (number of passengers/unit time) rather than just time for an unknown line to pass through the station.

If there are any journalists who aren’t busy with Bill Bennett’s casino records or Jayson Blair’s travel vouchers, this might be a story worth looking into.

EUGENE VOLOKH SAYS THAT WILLIAM SAFIRE IS WRONG about discrimination at the New York Times.

MISSING TOURIST UPDATE:

After a long silence on the matter the Algerian government said it was in touch with unnamed assailants believed to be holding the tourists. But last week it denied any such contact or that negotiations were under way to free the tourists.

The Swiss French-language weekly magazine Hebdo reported in its latest edition that the Algerian authorities had received ransom demands for between $23-$34 million for the group.

Blaise Godet, head of the Swiss foreign ministry’s political directorate who recently returned from Algeria, said Swiss authorities were not “negotiating with anyone” but were in constant touch with the Algerian authorities.

“There is no indication that the people (tourists) are no longer alive,” he told reporters in Berne on Monday.

About 5,000 Algerian troops are searching the vast Algerian Sahara, an area the size of France. Military aircraft and helicopters equipped with night vision are also being used.

It’s a big desert.

SO FAR ALL THE COLUMBIA INVESTIGATION SEEMS TO AGREE WITH THIS initial assessment on InstaPundit:

From the video it looks like structural failure, followed by an explosion as the spacecraft disintegrated. That’s unlikely to be the result of sabotage. Most likely it was failure in a wing spar or some other component, probably brought on by age and fatigue, though possibly caused by tile zippering and burn-through, or damage on launch.

It looks like zippering and burn-through, brought on by damage at launch made more severe by age and fatigue. Now this article in the Washington Post notes that the Shuttle fleet may just be too old and worn out to fly much more:

The shuttles — the only reusable manned spacecraft operating in the world — were difficult enough to maintain when their millions of parts were new. The effects of aging have added to the challenge, as well as adding an immeasurable degree of uncertainty.

The Columbia investigators have concluded that damage to the tough carbon composite material that shields the wings against the heat of reentry precipitated that disaster, and tests have also shown that a hidden effect of aging — oxidation that eats into surfaces — might have degraded the heat shielding and contributed to the deadly chain of events. But no one knows for sure.

NASA, unfortunately, is sufficiently anxious to keep the Shuttle fleet flying — and sufficiently underfunded — that it hasn’t looked very far into alternatives.

This is, of course, a reason why relying on a single fragile government program is silly.

SUMAN PALIT WEIGHS IN ON Eco-manslaughter.

A WEEK AGO, it was reported that German state secretary Jurgen Chrobog called the United States a “police state.”

I wonder what he has to say about this:

A German man who staged a political protest by writing “The Government is crap” on his own car, has been told to remove it or face jail.

Police failed to see the funny side of 33-year-old Stefan Lukoschek’s protest at the policies of Gerhard Schroeder.

Heh.

BILL HOBBS WONDERS why the Nashville Tennessean is ignoring efforts to enact a state “super-DMCA law” in Tennessee.

IF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION NEEDED ANOTHER REASON TO OPPOSE HOLLYWOOD ON INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAW, here it is:

The WALT DISNEY CO. is set to spend millions financing a new explosive Bush-bashing documentary from Michael Moore [BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE] — a documentary which claims bin Laden was greatly enriched by the Bush family!

DISNEY, via subsidiary MIRAMAX, has agreed to cover the production costs, said to be in the millions, of Moore’s planned FAHRENHEIT 911.

“The primary thrust of the new film is what has happened to the country since Sept. 11, and how the Bush administration used this tragic event to push its agenda,” Moore explains.

FAHRENHEIT 911 will be released during the upcoming presidential election cycle. [More Moore in ’04.]

Note to Rove: I know you guys generally sympathize with big corporations, but trust me on this — these guys aren’t your friends, and they never will be. So why not stick it to them on this IP stuff. It’s the right thing to do anyway. Just read this and this and, oh Hell, this, too.

UPDATE: A lawyer/reader emails:

I saw your InstaPundit post about Miramax financing Michael Moore’s planned “documentary” tying Pres Bush to bin Laden. My question is whether such a production would violate McCain-Feingold? Irrespective of whether one thinks McCain-Feingold is constitutional, wouldn’t it be a gas to see Michael Moore impaled on the horns of that legislation?

One word: Heh.

WHAT STARTED AS A BLOG ENTRY BY MICHAEL TOTTEN is now an oped on the Wall Street Journal webpage.

UPDATE: Totten responds to a critic here.

THE GUY IN THIS SWIMSUIT PHOTO looks kind of familiar. . . .

Pictures don’t lie! (Via Six Foot Pole.)

FOLLOWING UP LAST WEEK’S POST ON PRISON RAPE, here’s a link to the DoJ testimony on the bill. Contrary to earlier reports, federalism doesn’t seem to be an issue — at least in the Department’s public stance. Nor should it be. Instead, it’s all about the money.

Ashcroft needs to clear a path for this bill, which he says he supports, and override the opposition of the underlings.

BARBARA AMIEL HAS RESPONDED TO MARGARET DRABBLE’S MOUTH-FOAMING OF LAST WEEK:

The key to understanding Drabble’s lunatic rant is her reaction to what she says she saw on CNN celebrating the 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam war. She describes an old, shabbily dressed Vietnamese man bartering for dollars. The horror of this moment – an “elderly, impoverished” Vietnamese man wanting that terrible currency, American dollars, for heaven’s sake – just put the lid on it for Drabble. She writes: “The Vietnamese had won the war, but had lost the peace.”

Well no, Miss Drabble. The Vietnamese fought the war for communism and they won communism. That, indeed, is why the old man is impoverished, shabbily dressed and bartering for dollars. In your deliberate obtuseness, you become blind to the most self-evident conclusions and an apologist for the appalling regimes that are so far removed from your ostensible values.

Forgetting the danger Saddam posed to those outside his borders, we have now seen that removing him from power cost fewer Iraqi lives than just one of his killing sprees. Would you have condemned the Iraqi people to another 12 years of Saddam’s murderous nightmare?

Are you too sophisticated for Coca-Cola and Disneyfication but not for Saddam’s garish palaces and his giant posters on every street corner? After Stalin, Hitler and Mao, this horrifying man probably captures fourth place in the great mass murderers’ list, or fifth after Pol Pot.

One is tempted to call this visceral anti-Americanism “the Drabble syndrome”, but she is neither the first nor the most prominent sufferer. You could as easily call it the Pinter syndrome and it certainly is the BBC syndrome.

It’s a serious illness, debilitating but, sadly, not fatal. Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Here are more Brits speaking out against anti-Americanism.