ARMY YIELDS TO ARMY OF DAVIDS: It helps, of course, to be right.

HEH: ” Angry Muslim Terrorists Protest Cartoon Stereotypes of Angry Muslim Terrorists.” And that’s not even from Scrappleface.

UPDATE: But as usual, The Onion was ahead of the curve. This is from 1997:

Crazed Palestinian Gunman Angered by Stereotypes

HEBRON, WEST BANK—In an emotionally charged press conference Monday, crazed Palestinian gunman Faisal al Hamad expressed frustration over the stereotyping of his people.

Enlarge Image

Faisal al Hamad, seen here shrieking anti-U.S. slogans, says that “not every crazed Palestinian gunman is exactly alike.”

“As a crazed Palestinian gunman, I feel hurt by the negative portrayal of my people in the media,” said al Hamad, 31, a Hebron-area terrorist maniac. “None of us should have to live with stereotyping and ignorance.”

He then began screaming and firing into a busload of Israeli schoolchildren.

“It hurts that in this supposedly enlightened day and age, people still make assumptions about other people,” al Hamad said. “We should not rely on simple generalizations. Each crazed Palestinian gunman is an individual.”

Al Hamad said that he himself has often been unfairly stereotyped. “Any time I enter a crowded temple with fully loaded AK-47s in both hands, people just assume I’m going to open fire,” he said. “That really hurts.”

“Yes, I sometimes do gun people down in the name of the One True God,” he noted. “But there is so much more to me.”

Life imitating art imitating life. (Thanks to reader Brian Sament for the link).

MATTHEW YGLESIAS has joined BloggingHeadsTV. He’s good, too!

I think that this is one of the coolest new things on the web, and if I were, say, Chris Matthews, I’d be worried.

TERRY HEATON ON NEW MEDIA: So what do you do when the deer have guns? You go into the ammunition business.

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON targets Chris Matthews. He seems to be taking fire from all directions these days.

OUCH.

A WARNING ABOUT blogger conference calls.

SO I SPENT THE AFTERNOON IN TENURE MEETINGS, and I’m happy to say that neither the substance nor the atmosphere matched the kind of thing you read in David Horowitz’s The Professors. To the contrary, numerous people said things like “I disagreed with this argument, but the article was good.” That’s how it ought to be, of course.

Also, as I’ve observed before, we send all scholarship to multiple outside reviewers, something that I guess was never done with regard to Ward Churchill . . . .

BRENDAN LOY WONDERS why people aren’t paying more attention to Julian Bond.

Though Bond’s remarks were more offensive than Trent Lott’s this seems similar in other respects: There were media folks there who heard them, but chose not to report them.

BROKEBACK TO THE FUTURE: The film that couldn’t be made until now. Heh. (Via Ann Althouse).

UNEMPLOYMENT DROPS TO 4.7 PERCENT: “The U.S. unemployment rate fell to its lowest level in 4-1/2 years in January as employers hired 193,000 new workers, the government said on Friday in a report revising up job growth for the preceding five months.”

Hmm. More evidence that we’re hitting the top of the cycle?

PRAISE AND PREJUDICE: Daniel Glover rounds up blogospheric reactions to Boehner’s elevation to Majority Leader.

THE STATE DEPARTMENT PRACTICES APPEASEMENT:

Washington on Friday condemned caricatures in European newspapers of the Prophet Mohammad, siding with Muslims who are outraged that the publications put press freedom over respect for religion.

By inserting itself into a dispute that has become a lightning rod for anti-European sentiment across the Muslim world, the United States could help its own battered image among Muslims.

“These cartoons are indeed offensive to the belief of Muslims,” State Department spokesman Kurtis Cooper said in answer to a question. “We all fully recognize and respect freedom of the press and expression but it must be coupled with press responsibility. Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this manner is not acceptable.”

“We call for tolerance and respect for all communities for their religious beliefs and practices,” he added.

Major U.S. publications have not republishing the cartoons, which include depictions of Mohammad as a terrorist. That is in contrast to European media, which responded to the criticism against the original Danish newspaper that printed the caricatures by republishing the offensive images themselves.

Perhaps this is just payback for European non-support on other topics, but I think it’s a dreadful mistake.

UPDATE: Reader John Friedman emails: “I’m sorry. Did I miss the State Dept. analysis of ‘Piss Christ?’ Perhaps you could link to it.”

I’m sorry, but the lesson here is that if you want to be listened to, you should blow things up. That’s a very bad incentive structure, but it’s the one the allegedly responsible parties have created.

Related thoughts from Sissy Willis. Meanwhile, a reader from Belgium emails:

On the “dreadful mistake bit”. Of course we Europeans (I am Belgian) have only ourselves to blame but Americans have to understand how fearful we are becoming of this violent minority in our midst. Muslims are already a majority in the lowest age groups in several large European cities. The potential for civil war is clearly there and what is even more worrysome is the dedication of most our governments to appeasement.

For the US State dept to seize this opportunity to burnish its image with the “muslim community” was only to be expected however and I am pretty sure that this is exactly the kind of noise our governments would want to hear from the US at this stage. So no harm done to us in any case. It will gain you zero goodwill from the fanatics, but it will not harm us. I do hope however that nobody at State dept really thinks that the fanatics have to be appeased and that those caricatures should not have been published. *That* would be a mistake of the first magnitude.

Bernard Vanden Bloock
Overijse
Belgium

I agree.

FROM MUST-SEE TV TO PC TV: Actually, where Will and Grace is concerned I suspect a Rovian plot: As the characters have gradually become less attractive personally (and, in Debra Messing’s case, physically) they’ve also become more and more strident politically.

IN THE MAIL: James Swanson’s Manhunt : The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer. From the description, it sounds like a real-life thriller — a sort of Victorian Tom Clancy story, or something. “For 12 days, assisted by family and some women smitten by his legendary physical beauty, Booth relied on smarts, stealth and luck to elude the best detectives, military officers and local police the federal government could muster. Taking the reader into the action, the story is shot through with breathless, vivid, even gory detail.” Sounds pretty cool.

IT’S ONLY A flesh wound.

WE MUST BE NEAR THE TOP OF THE ECONOMIC CYCLE:

The humble bathroom, long a place of refuge and solitude, is playing quiet host to more workplace transactions. Bathroom business has gone way beyond tapping out furtive emails on a BlackBerry. Lately, more hard-driving homeowners have converted their loos into virtual satellite workspaces, with retractable desks or waterproof touch-screen monitors. Manufacturer Acquinox of New York says sales of its steam shower/whirlpool units — a hands-free phone is standard in each — nearly tripled last year to 14,800 modules. Wisconsin-based Seura, meanwhile, reports rising sales of its vanity mirrors, which feature LCD screens in the glass. The mirrors, starting at $2,400, let users check their tie-knot, then flip a switch to watch the embedded TV.

Very near the top.

APPARENTLY, I’M NOT SHILLING WELL ENOUGH for my brother’s band. Reader Barry Pike emails: “Did I miss it or have you already told everyone about Copper winning the D’Addario ‘Greatest Band We’ve Never Heard’ contest?”

Well, I thought I had, but searching “D’Addario” says I didn’t. D’oh! So here’s the link. (My brother is the one in the Smith & Wesson t-shirt.) They played a special show at Blue Cat’s a couple of weeks back, and quite a few bigshots from Atlantic Records were there, so stay tuned.

MICHAEL SOCOLOW writes in The Globe: “There is a dirty little secret in journalism: War reporting is the fastest way to get ahead. The trade-off is obvious. In exchange for putting one’s life on the line for a story, a journalistic organization will reward that courage with a promotion. Being in the right place at the right time is the essential journalistic value, and war zones always qualify as ‘right’ places.” But, he says, there’s more to it than that.

DANIEL HENNINGER:

At a time when the Democratic elites no longer have a vibrant ideology and the Republicans in Washington are deserting theirs, the public across the spectrum seems to be screaming for recognizable signposts, shared political principles. . . .

The argument of practicing politicians against all this is that politics is ultimately about control by whatever means. You win, you control. This is often true, but now amid Abramoff, “out of control” GOP spending and the Democrats’ 24/7 carping, whatever works is in low esteem in the heartland, if not discredited. In the new media world, the political sausage factory is always on view. Ugh.

He’s certainly right about that last.

MARK STEYN ON IRAN: He’s not very positive.

UPDATE: Lee Harris:

There is an important law about power that is too often overlooked by rational and peace-loving people. Any form of power, from the most primitive to the most mind-boggling, is always amplified enormously when it falls into the hands of those whose behavior is wild, erratic, and unpredictable. A gun being waved back and forth by a maniac is far more disturbing to us than the gun in the holster of the policeman, though both weapons are equally capable of shooting us dead. And what is true of guns is far more true in the case of nukes.

That is why nuclear weapons in an Iran dominated by a figure like its current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad make us more nervous than nuclear weapons in the hands of the Swiss. Both could make big explosions; but the Iranian bomb would tend to keep us awake thinking in the night, while the Swiss atomic bomb would be as threatening as a cuckoo-clock. This does not mean that Iran has to use the bomb; it doesn’t. All Iran has to do to make people wonder if it might use it — and many of us are already pondering that question, thanks to the disturbingly bellicose rhetoric of Ahmadinejad.

It is an immense form of power simply to make other people wonder if you might not do something bad and unpleasant to them.

A corollary is that the United States probably needs to be scarier and less predictable itself.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Yes, of course, Frank J. was way ahead of us on this. As always.

BIGWIG IS BACK, and he’s unhappy with European dhimmitude.

ARAB TERRORISTS IN IRAN:

Oil-rich Khuzestan is largely populated by Shia Arabs who have long complained of discrimination by the dominant Iranian majority. During 2005 there was considerable unrest and sporadic anti-government bombings in June and October, followed by widespread public protests.

Arab resistance groups in Khuzestan are rather shadowy. The “Ahvaz Resistance Squad” may be a new group, or perhaps a cover name for one of the older groups that have claimed responsibility for incidents in the province in the past – the Arbav Martyrs of Khuzestan, the Arab People’s Democratic Front, the Arab Struggle Movement for Liberating Ahvaz, and Afwaj al-Nahdah al-Musallahah Al-Ahwaz. Indeed, it is possible that all of these “groups” are just cover names for the same organization.

The Iran-Iraq War during the 1980s was touched when Saddam Hussein invaded Khuzestan with the intention of annexing it to Iraq. The Iranian Arabs largely remained loyal, perhaps more because they new Sunni Arab dominated Iraq was not nice to Shia Arabs. But after the war, the ethnic Iranians resumed their long term disdain and domination of Iranian Arabs (and Arabs in general). The Iranians can’t believe their Arabs are smart, or organized, enough to get an effective terrorist organization going. Thus, it must all be a CIA or MI-6 backed plot.

Interesting.

TIM CAVANAUGH ISSUES A PREDICTION:

The Republican Party will retain control of both houses of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections. . . .

The problem for the dems is that they have nobody capable of doing what Gingrich did in 1994: defying Tip O’Neill’s law and conceptualizing 435 separate contests as a single national referendum. The only Democratic legislator who gets anybody’s body heat up to room temperature is Barack Obama, and he is a) not yet old enough to see an R-rated film without accompaniment and b) in the Senate, where revolutions never occur, and where any attempts at energizing the troops will be blocked by DINOs Clinton and Lieberman.

That leaves the House. Fortunately for the Dems, they don’t have as tall a task as Gingrich faced in ’94. Unfortunately, they also don’t have a Gingrich. They don’t even have grich, or gin or even a ngr. They have Nancy Pelosi, the most incompetent politician in the western hemisphere.

But he’s a notorious right-wing shill.

HOWARD STERN UPDATE: Went out for beers with Doug Weinstein, a big Howard Stern fan, and he’s very happy with his decision to subscribe to Sirius in order to get Stern. He says Stern has been on a roll since going on satellite: “Every day makes me smile.”