TIM BLAIR deplores racism at the polls. It was obstructing minority voters, too.

TIGHTENING IMMIGRATION LAWS in Switzerland. I think we’ll see more of that across Europe.

OVER AT THE COUNTERTERRORISM BLOG, Andrew Cochran writes on the New York Times’ reporting of leaked excerpts from the National Intelligence Estimate:

The American people deserve to know, to the maximum extent possible, the actual findings and conclusions in this NIE and not depend on partial reports and leaks, which could be driven by all sorts of hidden agendas. The White House and DNI Negroponte should ask the members of the 9/11 Commission to independently review the NIE and release an unclassified version or summary of the report as soon as possible.

Hidden agendas? Surely not.

RALLYING AGAINST HEZBOLLAH in Lebanon.

TRAVELLING TO DISCUSS GLOBAL WARMING via Lear Jet.

JAKE TAPPER corrects Bill Clinton’s history.

Plus, Chris Wallace’s questions for Rumsfeld.

LARRY KUDLOW says that Bush is turning things around for the Republicans. It does look that way now, but there’s still lots of time before the elections.

UPDATE: John Wixted has a somewhat-related post on Bush and the economy.

MARTIN LINDESKOG wants advice on affordable digital cameras.

I’ve been partial to the small Sonys. My current pocket camera of choice is the Sony DSC-W7, though you could cut down to the 5-megapixel W5 model without sacrificing much. Ann Althouse has the DSC-T9, which adds optical image stabilization, something I wish my camera had. (And as her blog illustrates, she gets excellent photos out of it.) On the other hand, my camera uses AA batteries, which means that you can use alkalines in a pinch. Any other suggestions for Martin? He’s taking comments.

One thing that’s worth looking at in a digital still camera is video capability. For example, I shot this video, both above and underwater, using digital still cameras and the quality was entirely adequate for the Web. That’s very convenient.

RADLEY BALKO’S REASON ARTICLE ON CORY MAYE is now available on line and you should read the whole thing. But here’s a bit on how no-knock wrong-house raids go wrong and the double standard in prosecuting innocent citizens who respond appropriately to having their doors kicked down by unidentified strangers:

In 2000 drug cops in Modesto, California, accidentally shot 11-year-old Alberto Sepulveda in the back of the head at point-blank range during a botched raid on the boy’s home. In 2003 police in New York City raided the home of 57-year-old city worker Alberta Spruill based on a bad tip from an informant. The terrified Spruill had a heart attack and died at the scene. Last year Baltimore County police shot and killed Cheryl Lynn Noel, a churchgoing wife and mother, during a no-knock raid on her home after finding some marijuana seeds while sifting through the family’s trash.

There are dozens more examples. And a botched raid needn’t end in death to do harm. It’s hard to get a firm grip on just how often it happens—police tend to be reluctant to track their mistakes, and victims can be squeamish about coming forward—but a 20-year review of press accounts, court cases, and Kraska’s research suggests that each year there are at least dozens, perhaps hundreds, of “wrong door” raids. And even when everything goes right, it’s overkill to use what is essentially an urban warfare unit to apprehend a nonviolent drug suspect.

Criminal charges against police officers who accidentally kill innocent people in these raids are rare. Prosecutors almost always determine that the violent, confrontational nature of the raids and the split-second decisions made while conducting them demand that police be given a great deal of discretion. Yet it’s the policy of using volatile forced-entry raids to serve routine drug warrants that creates those circumstances in the first place.

Worse, prosecutors are much less inclined to take circumstances into account when it comes to pressing charges against civilians who make similar mistakes. When civilians who are innocent or who have no history of violence defend their homes during a mistaken raid, they have about a one in two chance of facing criminal charges if a policeman is killed or injured. When convicted, they’ve received sentences ranging from probation to life in prison to, in Maye’s case, the death penalty.

It’s a remarkable double standard. The reason these raids are often conducted late at night or very early in the morning is to catch suspects while they’re sleeping and least capable of processing what’s going on around them. Raids are often preceded by the deployment of flash-bang grenades, devices designed to confuse everyone in the vicinity. While narcotics officers have (or at least are supposed to have) extensive training in how to act during a raid, suspects don’t, and officers have the advantage of surprise. Yet prosecutors readily forgive mistaken police shootings of innocent civilians and unarmed drug suspects while expecting the people on the receiving end of late-night raids to show exemplary composure, judgment, and control in determining whether the attackers in their homes are cops or criminals.

This is wrong. It’s not only a reason why no-knock raids should be banned except in life-or-death situations, but it’s also an example of how unfettered prosecutorial discretion is unfair and dangerous. In cases like this, there should be much more accountability for decisions to prosecute, or not to prosecute.

I’d also like to see federal legislation — justified under Congress’s 14th Amendment section 5 powers — limiting such raids and providing for legal remedies, including money damages without the shield of official immunity for officers, supervisors, and agencies.

I think such legislation would be fairly popular, but I suspect that the power of the interests involved is sufficient to ensure that it doesn’t ever happen.

And Jim Henley gives Radley Balko a much-deserved pat on the back for his excellent work on this case.

“YEAH, YEAH, EVERYTHING YOU SAY. FILL IT UP, BOY!” An amusing cartoon from Venezuela.

CLINTON ON CHRIS WALLACE: “You read the transcript yesterday. You saw the clip. Now, you’ve seen the whole interview.”

Actually, I was on a weekend trip to the mountains with family (rainy but nice) and didn’t see the interview. But the clip is online here.

A better response for Clinton would seem to have been something like this: (Indulgent smile with slight look of boyish contrition, not carried to the lip-biting level) “Well, I admit we made some mistakes in the 1990s, and I’m sure President Bush has made some too. But the real question is where we go from here, and . . . ”

He knows that, too, I suspect. So why did he respond the way he did?

UPDATE: Some history, here and here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Clinton and bin Laden and the perils of citing Richard Clarke: “even a casual reading of Clarke’s book reveals that it was one of the more important sources for ‘The Path To 9/11,’ the ABC miniseries that so irritated the Clintonites. For that reason and many others, I wouldn’t want more people reading Clarke’s book if I were Clinton.”

MORE: Still more history here. Clinton is apparently forgetting his own Administration’s public positions, including those taken in the 1998 indictment of Osama bin Laden. Once again, I think his reaction was very unwise, and likely to harm Democratic prospects this fall.

MORE STILL: A different take on what Clinton was about:

What’s struck me most, in the context of these recent events, is just how extremely *protective* of Clinton liberals (e.g. blogs & blog commenters) have become. This isn’t surprising, and it’s not a negative thing per se: cf. the protectiveness of Bush on the right, especially when he’s being assailed (unfairly & dishonestly, in their view) by the media. The comparison is illuminating, of course, because Bush does very little public self-defending against his harshest critics (and never complains of being ‘victimized’ by the media)– though of course commenters on the right do that for him. Clinton, with these recent actions, is (I think) trying to tap into a similar dynamic– e.g. trying to tap into the (surprising– and surprisingly mainstream) surge of protectiveness & feeling for him during the impeachment saga. (And lest we forget, that was the origin of moveon.org, wasn’t it.) . . .

I do think it’s likely that his latest public acts are a kind of strategic gamble, specifically directed at the left (rallying it for Hillary, who can then do what she needs to do to convince the center)– (and the left is eating it up aren’t they, he’s playing them like a piano)— more likely than that this last outburst was an ‘accident’ (esp. when the questioning was *so* to be expected– he himself practically *asked* for it, in making such a big deal of the 9/11 movie).

Hmm.

I THINK JOHN COLE IS MISSING THE POINT WHEN HE WRITES:

The notion that the media somehow share some culpability in the murders, mayhem, and chaos that followed the Pope’s speech because they ‘willingly’ work with terrorists to ‘ambush’ the general public is so absurd that it shouldn’t warrant comment. Is the media to blame for the murder rate, because every night I check the television, and they cover it? . . .

But to suggest that the media covering jihadist tendencies and calls to arms by radical clerics is somehow working in concert with terorists is not just offensive, it is stupid.

Cole undermines his case a bit by admitting that there are cases where media people have “behaved inappropriately” — that is, faked news on terrorists’ behalf, but the bigger point, stressed in my post and in the Austin Bay article that I linked, is that media attention isn’t just neutral coverage — the way it generally is with, say, urban crime — but rather the actual goal of terrorists. In fact, it’s their lifeblood. Terrorism is an information war disguised as a military conflict, and media coverage is an essential part of the terrorist plan.

Media people know this, and even admit it, but don’t let it affect their coverage — though as Pam Hess of UPI admitted, they’re far more careful about being spun by the U.S. military — and one reason why they don’t let it affect their coverage is that terrorism gives them ratings. That’s what I meant by their mutually-supporting relationship. Terrorists provide ratings (and, as we’ve seen, often via staged news events) and news media provide the coverage that terrorists need. As I’ve noted in the past, news media are entirely capable of moderating their own coverage when they think the stakes are high — say, protection of confidential sources, or promotion of racial tolerance — but here they clearly don’t feel that way. If they applied as much skepticism and adversarialism to terrorist behavior as they do to the U.S. military, few of us would be complaining.

In his novel Soft Targets, Dean Ing suggested a media-based information campaign against terrorism. One of the many ways in which that novel is obsolete is that it’s now impossible to imagine the press cooperating.

UPDATE: More thoughts on terrorists and the media here, from a journalist. “So then, why does the media take such pains to avoid parroting, carrying water for or even vaguely reflecting the ideals of the U.S. military or the nation’s elected government yet so wantonly accept and even hire the terrorists’ spin?”

SOME FAQS ON BLOGGING from Dean Barnett, who’s becoming a master of that form.

ERIC SCHEIE: Was this a war against bin Laden? Or is it a war against jihad?

Personally, I think it’s the latter, which makes news of bin Laden’s painful and “pathetic” death — though welcome if true — only moderately important.

MORE QUESTIONS ABOUT THE TRUSTWORTHINESS OF A.P. REPORTING from the Middle East, in the Boston Herald.

SECRETS OF SOUTH PARK:

“That’s where we kind of agree with some of the people who’ve criticized our show,” Stone says. “Because it really is open season on Jesus. We can do whatever we want to Jesus, and we have. We’ve had him say bad words. We’ve had him shoot a gun. We’ve had him kill people. We can do whatever we want. But Mohammed, we couldn’t just show a simple image.”

During the part of the show where Mohammed was to be depicted — benignly, Stone and Parker say — the show ran a black screen that read: “Comedy Central has refused to broadcast an image of Mohammed on their network.”

Other networks took a similar course, refusing to air images of Mohammed — even when reporting on the Denmark cartoon riots — claiming they were refraining because they’re religiously tolerant, the South Park creators say.

“No you’re not,” Stone retorts. “You’re afraid of getting blown up. That’s what you’re afraid of. Comedy Central copped to that, you know: ‘We’re afraid of getting blown up.'”

Conveying an unfortunate message, and lesson, in the process.

MEGAN MCARDLE: “I’m not sure you could pay me enough to go back to 1973, in fact. I think I’d rather be a journalist living now than a multi-millionaire living then.”

Plus, some sensible thoughts on terrorism and civil liberties.

SOME PERSPECTIVE on the press and Hugo Chavez.

TRYING TO SAVE THE TRIPOLI SIX, who are being scapegoated for lousy Libyan infectious-disease policies. Darksyde emails: “Background– the Libyan was going to shoot some volunteer workers who helped out in a Children’s hospital. They’re accused of infecting kids with AIDS. In fact, it’s common in third world shitholes to reuse the syringes, and infections thus are easily transmitted. We have infectious disease profs and researchers who can back that up with plenty of documentation.”

Yes, syringe reuse is common, and disastrous. So is scapegoating.

OUCH: “He’s just another talk-radio host, really — only this time by way of Yale and Mensa.”

Plus, an amusing account of the origins of “Laphamization:”

There’s one column that’s conspicuously absent from this collection, and that’s the one from September 2004, which included a brief account of the Republican National Convention. Lapham wrote it as if the convention had already happened, ruefully reflecting on the content and sharing with readers a question that occurred to him as he listened; unfortunately, the magazine arrived on subscribers’ doorsteps before the convention had even taken place, forcing Lapham to admit that the scene was a fiction. He apologized, but pointed out that political conventions are drearily scripted anyway — he basically knew what was going to be said. By this logic, though, I could have chosen not to read “Pretensions to Empire” before reviewing it, since I already knew Lapham’s sensibility, just as he claims to know the Republicans’. But I dutifully read the whole book. And I discovered, with some ironic poignancy, that Lapham did have a point: some people never acquire any more nuance as they go.

Ouch, again.

UPDATE: More on Lapham here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Further thoughts on Lapham from Roger Kimball.

SENSITIVITY: “Bill Clinton has been injecting himself into the news a lot lately, and it inevitably gives his critics a new opportunity to go through the case against him. . . . He wants to be the mellow, above-the-fray ex-president, but he really can’t control the presentation. And now that he’s shown how raw and angry he is about the criticisms, it’s not going to get any easier.”

Count me as one of those bored with Clinton criticism — but surprised that he’s restarting it now. So is Tom Maguire, who wonders why Clinton is saying and doing things that ensure that the runup to the 2006 elections will be filled with unflattering looks at the Clinton Administration’s antiterror policies.

Tom Harkin isn’t helping the Democrats either. I blame Karl Rove’s mind-control rays. Democrats: Protect yourselves before it’s too late!

UPDATE: More thoughts here. And a related post, here. Those Rovian mind-control rays are powerful stuff!

EDIROL FOLLOWUP: In response to my post the other day, Dale Wetzel emails:

Have you ever used an external microphone with the Edirol? If so, what type, and why did you choose it?

Have you ever used an external microphone with the Olympus besides the stereo mic that you bought with it?

I’m interested in knowing if you’ve ever tried a handheld mic (omni or unidirectional) with either recorder, and if so, what you thought of the results.

I haven’t used external mikes other than the above, but I just ordered this one last week. I’ll report on its performance when it comes.

THE CARNIVAL OF CARS is up!

HOW MANY EMBEDDED REPORTERS are covering the Iraq war? Take a wild guess.

REPORTS THAT OSAMA BIN LADEN IS DEAD: Gateway Pundit has a roundup. Dying of typhoid in a cave doesn’t sound very heroic.