A PUBLIC HEALTH APPROACH to preventing genocide.

Not bad as far as it goes, but they’re missing some risk factors. More here and, especially, here.

IN THE MAIL: Steven Malanga’s The New New Left: How American Politics Works Today. It’s all about interest-group fundraising, apparently.

Also Marci Hamilton’s God vs. the Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law. Thoughts on the separation of church and state.

WITH JOE BIDEN RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT, we’re likely to hear more about the rather lame plagiarism scandal that sunk him in 1988.

You can read a defense of Biden in that role, from my book (with Peter Morgan), The Appearance of Impropriety, if you like. I think that Biden was shafted by the Dukakis campaign, with help from the press, and that the whole flap was silly.

Biden’s candidacy ought to be sunk by his sponsorship of the “R.A.V.E. act,” targeting electronic music performances as havens for drugs, and by his shameless water-carrying for the entertainment industry on copyright issues. But since those are issues of substance, I suspect we’ll hear more about the plagiarism story.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS is up! It’s all about money, so what’s not to like?

SIGNS OF PROGRESS: Brendan Loy asks:

Which is a bigger surprise: the anti-Syrian candidates’ victory in the Lebanese election, or the New York Times’s statement (in the third paragraph of the day’s top story, no less) that the result is “perhaps an example of a greater yearning for democracy in the Arab world”?

I’m going with number two. Story here. Excerpt:

Opponents of Syrian domination claimed a stunning majority victory in the final round of Lebanon’s parliamentary elections on Sunday night in a rebellion touched off by the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri four months ago.

An anti-Syrian alliance that tried to bridge religious lines and was led by Mr. Hariri’s son, 35-year-old Saad Hariri, a Sunni Muslim, won at least 21 of 28 contested seats in northern Lebanon, the last polling area in the elections that have been staggered over the past four weekends. That gave the alliance a majority in the next 128-seat Parliament.

It was a startling change in the way politics have usually been carried out here – along strict clan and religious lines and long under the control of Syria – and perhaps an example of a greater yearning for democracy in the Arab world.

Heh. Indeed.

PROTESTING THE IRANIAN ELECTIONS: Publius has a roundup, with photos.

FRED PHELPS UPDATE: Anti-Americanism and idiotarianism don’t have to go together, I guess. But it sure seems that way sometimes.

UPDATE: Here’s a firsthand blog report to the effect that Fred Phelps is, indeed, an “asshat.”

I can report that they appeared to be mono-gastric, bi-pedal, and carbon-based; other than that, I really couldn’t see even a glint of humanity in their eyes. As I left, one of them shouted at me, “Make sure lots of people see those pictures.”

Wish granted. Asshat.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Yes, it’s fairly unusual for me to be calling someone an “asshat.” I’m not big on name-calling. But if you can’t call Fred Phelps an asshat, there’s really no reason for the word to exist.

More background on Phelps here, from Clayton Cramer.

MORE: Agreement on the whole asshat thing. And there’s more at The Mudville Gazette, too.

MARK STEYN HAS MUCH MORE ON DICK DURBIN:

Judging from the way he’s dug himself in, Dick Durbin, the Number Two Democrat in the US Senate, genuinely believes Gitmo is analogous to Belsen, the gulags and the killing fields. But he crossed a line, from anti-Bush to anti-American, and most Americans have no interest in following him down that path.You can’t claim (as Democrats do, incessantly) to “support our troops” and then dump them in the same category as the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge. In the hermetically sealed echo chamber between the Dem leadership, the mainstream US media, Hollywood, Ivy League “intellectuals” and European sophisticates, the gulag cracks are utterly unexceptional. But, for a political party that keeps losing elections because it has less and less appeal outside a few coastal enclaves, Durbin’s remarks are devastating. The Democrats flopped in 2002 and 2004 because they were seen as incoherent on national security issues. Explicitly branding themselves as the “terrorists’ rights” party is unlikely to improve their chances for 2006.

Indeed. Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: If you haven’t read it already, this piece by Tom Bevan on Durbin is a must-read.

JIM DUNNIGAN OFFERS SOME GOOD NEWS AND SOME BAD NEWS regarding recent reports:

This is not to say that there isn’t a possible terrorist link to the thefts of the shipping containers or the uniforms, or the alleged increase in the use of bogus credentials, but rather that no one is responsible for determining what constitutes a “normal” rate of such incidents, and given that, it’s impossible to tell if there’s been a significant change in the rate of incidents.

Not entirely comforting. In fact, it fits the bigger good news / bad news story on the Bush Administration and terrorism. Good news: The “forward strategy” has done a lot more than most anyone expected to keep terror from American shores. Bad news: Despite huge amounts of money and lots of new legal powers, the “homeland security” apparatus is largely useless at dealing with any who get here.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE REVOLUTIONS IS UP, with lots of information on the Iraqi and Lebanese elections, among other things.

MORE CONFLICT between antidiscrimination law and free speech:

Two former editorial writers at The Indianapolis Star have gone to court, charging that top newsroom managers “consistently and repeatedly demonstrated … a negative hostility toward Christianity.”

James Patterson and Lisa Coffey have sued the newspaper and its owner, Gannett Co., claiming religious, racial and age discrimination in a lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal court. . . .

According to a story in the Star today, Patterson and Coffey claim in the lawsuit that Ryerson and Henry were hostile toward Christianity and Christian employees at the paper. They also assert that Henry and Ryerson strongly disagreed “with anyone who had a biblical view of homosexuality.”

I suspect that we’ll see more complaints like this. I also hope that they’ll lead to a considerable pruning-back of “hostile environment” doctrine.

EUGENE VOLOKH EXPLAINS what to do when you get leaked government documents.

MICKEY KAUS:

But the treatment of Alberto Coll of the U.S. Naval War College (a Bush 41 official-turned-embargo-critic prosecuted for having an affair on an otherwise apparently legal trip to Cuba) seems a geniuine outrage.

I confess I haven’t followed the story closely, but it looks that way to me.

[LATER: Quote corrected from “arrested” to “prosecuted” to reflect correction by Mickey.]