GATEWAY PUNDIT has more on the French riots.

UPDATE: Meryl Yourish writes that Christopher Caldwell predicted this three years ago.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Rand Simberg notes similar riots in Denmark, and has some translated reports.

MICKEY KAUS is cruelly mocking CNN’s Jonathan Klein over Aaron Brown’s departure. Meanwhile, there’s this: “Anderson Cooper is designated as the new star of CNN and, as much as I enjoy Cooper’s work, it seems a risk to me. There is, to be honest, a sort of local news quality to Cooper.” Ouch.

ALL ALITO, ALL THE TIME: At N.Z. Bear’s new Alito topic page.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY:

If stealing and destroying secret documents, stuffing them into your pants and then lying about it isn’t a crime worthy of jail time, why is having a different recollection of events than Tim Russert?

I guess the pushback has begun.

UPDATE: Tigerhawk is unconvinced: “The question, I think, is backwards: isn’t the real mystery why Sandy Berger got off with a small fine and no jail time?”

J.C. WATTS: “Republicans in just 10 years have developed the arrogance it took the Democrats 30 years to develop.”

SO I’VE BEEN GRADING my Administrative Law assignments. Every year I pick a set of proposed regulations from the Federal Register, and have my students draft comments on them, which I then file so that they become part of the rulemaking docket. I don’t tell the students what to say; they get to pick their positions. I just grade them based on their logic, research, avoidance of typos, etc. I’m usually quite impressed with what they produce, and this year is no exception. My experience has been that law students are better at projects like this than at taking exams. That’s good, since one hardly ever takes an exam as part of practicing law.

DAFYDD AB HUGH wonders what’s going on in Paris.

UPDATE: Brussels Journal has some reports.

Meanwhile, reader Steve Donohue emails:

Rhetorical question: why is it that largely imagined riots in New Orleans receive almost non-stop coverage, but actual riots in France receive absolutely no coverage?

Well, it’s not quite “absolutely no coverage” — but compared to the New Orleans coverage, I guess it would seem that way.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Joel Shepherd emails:

It’s not an intefada. I’m an Australian SF author temporarily living in Paris; sadly I don’t have my own blog (yet), but I’m writing a freelance article on liberte-cherie, the French libertarian organisation (www.liberte-cherie.com). I’m no expert, but I’m learning some things.

The problem in France is not the same as in the UK or the Netherlands. There, there’s been an overdose of PC multi culturalism… but American critics are wrong to assign that to France. France HAS insisted on integration, as seen by the controversial ban on headscarves in French schools. And most French muslims do consider themselves French, to varying degrees, and Islamic extremism is pretty small thing here (there was far more protest against the headscarf ban outside of France than inside). So it’s not an intefada.

There’s just no damn jobs. White college grads can’t get jobs, what hope do immigrants from regions with bad schools have? I think this is more like the LA Rodney King riots — there’s people there who want the French dream, just as in LA people wanted the American dream, but they just don’t see it when they look around, and they resent the fact enormously. They can’t change schools to get a better education because the government says you have to go to the school where you live, and they live where they do because of the zoning laws… which I’m no expert about, but I do know that the government owns 30 percent of all housing in France, and poor immigrants basically live where they’re told. The government tries to give them everything and does it extremely badly, there’s no upward mobility, and it doesn’t breed a happy community. Religion exacerbates the feeling of exclusion, I’m sure, but the rioting seems mostly driven by economics and bad social policy.

So yeah, it’s a stupid French government problem, but not the one some American critics are ascribing… however attractive it might be to do so.

Interesting.

CATHY SEIPP writes on books and holiness.

DON’T LET THE LITTLE PEOPLE SPEAK:

WASHINGTON (AP) – Online political expression should not be exempt from campaign finance law, the House decided Wednesday as lawmakers warned that the Internet has opened up a new loophole for uncontrolled spending on elections. . . .

The vote in effect clears the way for the FEC to move ahead with court-mandated rule-making to govern political speech and campaign spending on the Internet.

You might not like what they say. (Via Steel Turman).

UPDATE: Andrew Roth:

With spending out of control, this vote shows that not only do politicians take our money, they take our freedom to speak against them as well. That should scare the pants off of anyone.

Indeed.

Power Line:

What is happening here is that certain people–the editorial board of the New York Times, the Democrats on the Federal Election Commission–are trying to put sites like this one out of business.

Yes.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A somewhat more positive take from one of the bill’s sponsors:

As many of you might have just witnessed on CSPAN, the House voted 225 to 182 on the Online Freedom of Speech Act (H.R. 1606) — a majority but less than the two-thirds required for a “suspension” bill to clear the House.

I am encouraged that this important legislation received the support of a clear bipartisan majority. Most Members of Congress support protecting free speech on the Internet. . . .

We proved that we can pass this bill in the House under regular order. Working with leadership, I hope we can achieve this worthy goal before the FEC issues new regulations that will prohibit Americans from exercising their First Amendment rights over the Internet.

I hope so, too.

MORE: Via an update to the Power Line post above, here’s the roll call vote. If you’re unhappy with how your representative voted, let ’em know.

I’VE CHANGED MY MIND: The Bush Administration should have known that there was a problem with its analysis of Saddam’s weapons program. The tipoff: when it found that it was on the same page as Jimmy Carter.

ANNOUNCING a Carnival of Arnold. (This Arnold, not this one.) Get your submissions in!

JACK SHAFER is waiting for a Kristof correction.

UPDATE: Shafer gets results — see his update.

THE MUDVILLE GAZETTE wonders why the New York Times can’t seem to quote soldiers accurately.

MICHELLE MALKIN, MICHAEL LEDEEN, MARC COOPER, and more, profiled over at the Pajamas Media site.

SOME OUT-OF-THE-MAINSTREAM CRITICISM of protection for criminal defendants.

IN RESPONSE TO MY COLUMN TODAY, Patrick Eickert emails: “Will your army of davids fix our immigration policies in a time frame that matters? How about our energy policies? Or our intelligence institutions?”

Actually, I’ve got a chapter on private antiterror efforts, expanding on the theme presented here. I didn’t write about immigration, which I agree is a core question of sovereignty and one that doesn’t lend itself readily to self-help, though the Minutemen are an early sign of what we might see if the federal government remains ineffectual on the subject.

As for energy, well, all those people out there buying more efficient cars, etc., are doing their parts, and I think there’s more movement in that direction than is generally recognized. I had a beer with a friend yesterday — a lifelong Republican and no Green — who’s running his new Dodge 2500 pickup on biodiesel. Why? It’s cheaper, and he likes the idea.

(He also notes that his new Dodge gets about 2mpg more than the old one, and has more horsepower, suggesting that the folks at Chrysler are holding up their end, too, at least somewhat.)

And speaking of influencing the government, he told me that he’s gotten two calls from the GOP fundraisers asking him to give $1000 or more and he’s turned them both down. Why? “They haven’t delivered what they promised.” That’s another army of Davids that’s not getting noticed as much as it might. Yet.

THANK GOODNESS FOR SCIENCE.

CRUNCHING THE NUMBERS on Alito.

SOME advice for Prince Charles that will surely go unheeded.

MORE ON ANTIWAR HISTORICAL REVISIONISM from the BullMoose:

The Moose does not have to trust George W. Bush to hold that view. He believes Tony Blair. For that matter, most of the Clinton national security team was convinced that Saddam posed a threat to American interests and security. It was hardly a vast neo-con conspiracy that brought us to war.

Will the American people have faith in and trust a party that claims that it was gullibly duped, or as George Romney claimed about another war – that it was “brainwashed.”? Moreover, should the objective be re-fighting the reasons to go to war and making the Democrats the official anti-war party or should the goal be achieving reasonable success in Iraq? If you believe in the former than you would encourage more efforts like the one Senate Democrats undertook yesterday. If you believe in the latter, you want the opposition party to present a better plan for winning this war.

While the war is increasingly unpopular, the Democrats should be careful that they are positioning themselves as a party that is gullible, feckless and indecisive on national security. It may provide immense partisan satisfaction to flummox the Republicans on a procedural maneuver, but beware of the long-term impact on the party which already suffers from a perception of being weak on national security.

“Weak,” at the very least.

GAS PRICES AND ENERGY POLICY: Some lessons from the 1970s.

At least we’re not turning oil into all those polyester leisure suits, this time around.

HEARD MICHELLE MALKIN on Neal Boortz’s show, plugging her new book (which seems to be doing quite well on Amazon). I noticed that she was careful to credit Perry deHavilland of Samizdata for originating the term “moonbat.” Good for her.

Meanwhile she’s getting racist and sexist Amazon reviews from lefties. I like this response, from another Amazon reviewer: “What better way to affirm Michelle Malkin’s beliefs than to review the histrionics in many of the posted reviews.”

Yes, it does pretty much prove her point.

UPDATE: Related thoughts here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reviewing the reviewers: “Michelle couldn’t have paid for better advertising.”

MORE ON DIGITAL FREE SPEECH:

After all, when it comes to the Internet, money hardly translates into influence. Plenty of expensively produced Web sites are flops, while some of the most popular Web sites and blogs cost virtually nothing to run.

The real problem, it seems, is that the speech police don’t like any speech that they don’t get to . . . well, police.

The Hensarling-Reid approach is the best way to head off an assault on the Internet — for now.

The next step is to start reconsidering whether regulating political speech is a good idea under any circumstances.

Indeed.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Robert Samuelson writes in the Post that both parties are fiscal phonies. The fact that we can’t trust elected officials on this suggests to me that we’ll see more pressure for structural solutions.

MAX BOOT writes that Joe Wilson is Plamegate’s real liar, and offers an extensive list of Wilson misrepresentations.