A NEW STRATEGY FOR COMBATING SCHOOL SHOOTINGS:

Youngsters in a suburban Fort Worth school district are being taught not to sit there like good boys and girls with their hands folded if a gunman invades the classroom, but to rush him and hit him with everything they got – books, pencils, legs and arms.

“Getting under desks and praying for rescue from professionals is not a recipe for success,” said Robin Browne, a major in the British Army reserve and an instructor for Response Options, the company providing the training to the Burleson schools.

That kind of fight-back advice is all but unheard of among schools, and some fear it will get children killed.

But school officials in Burleson said they are drawing on the lessons learned from a string of disasters such as Columbine in 1999 and the Amish schoolhouse attack in Pennsylvania last week. . . .Browne recommends students and teachers “react immediately to the sight of a gun by picking up anything and everything and throwing it at the head and body of the attacker and making as much noise as possible. Go toward him as fast as we can and bring them down.”

This seems right to me. Joanne Jacobs has further thoughts on the subject.

UPDATE: Here are some further thoughts, from an expert.

ANOTHER UPDATE: SayUncle weighs in.

MORE: It’s certainly a change from this approach:

At Columbine, the armed “school resource officer” refused to pursue the killers into the building, and kept himself safe outside while the murders were going on inside. Even after SWAT teams arrived, and while, via an open 911 line, the authorities knew that students were being methodically executed in the library, the police stood idle just a few yards outside the library.

Jeez. (Via Mike Rappaport).

MORE STILL: John Weidner is saying I told you so!

THE BOOBIES ARE BACK:

Oh, yes, feminism has gotten rolled up into the conventional left-right of American politics. Ever since feminists chose to subordinate themselves to the interests of the Democratic party to help Bill Clinton with his problems, the feminist discourse in this country has been lame. It’s a means to a political end, and so you always know who your “enemies” are. Fifteen years ago, feminists critiquing each other was an important part of feminism. Now, doggedly serving liberal partisan politics squelches everything that could become vital.

Maybe if feminists had the nerve to engage in real debate about feminism they could get some young people excited about real ideas. But go ahead, tart up your website with boobies for now.

Yes, please do. Not the botched ones, though.

UPDATE: It could be worse. No, really.

“DARFUR IS JUST RWANDA IN SLOW MOTION:” This week’s Blog Week in Review podcast is up, with Gerard van der Leun, Austin Bay, and Michael Totten.

SOMEBODY TELL PRESIDENT BUSH that border security isn’t there yet:

In Brownsville, he witnessed half a dozen men swim under one of the international bridges “with complete immunity” which in turn prompted him to take the immigration issue to the next level.

Bhakta decided to see if he could get an elephant accompanied by a six-piece mariachi band across the river.

According to his Web site, he is in favor of “sensible immigration reform” and supports a border fence, local law enforcement assistance with immigration laws and the use of the National Guard troops to help the U.S. Border Patrol.

“To my surprise, the band played on, the elephants splashed away, and nobody showed up,” Bhakta said of the stunt. “I’m astounded.” . . . “If I can get an elephant led by a mariachi band into this country, I think Osama bin Laden could get across with all the weapons of mass destruction he could get into this country,” Bhakta said.

Well, now that the mariachi secret is out, anyway.

UPDATE: Here’s video.

IT’S ALL OVER for Republican Bob Ney, resigning soon in the face of corruption charges. “Through a combination of arrogance, ambition, and corruption Ney has arrived at the worst of all possible outcomes: he’s going to prison next year as a convicted felon, and by dragging out the process (culminating with a guilty plea 3 weeks before the midterm elections) he’s done about as much damage as he could possibly do to the Republican party under the circumstances.”

THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION has joined the Harry Reid pile-on:

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid would be well advised to stop thundering about corruption in the Republican ranks or crying “cover-up” over the GOP’s failure to promptly and appropriately deal with former Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) and his sexually explicit e-mails to congressional pages. Reid faces too many questions about his own behavior to crusade against the misdeeds of others.

Currently, he’s trying to explain a land deal in Nevada on which he made a pile of money and which may not have been properly disclosed. When the property was sold in 2004, it belonged to a company formed with a long-time friend and included a parcel that once had been owed by Reid. Despite having transferred his parcel to the company, the Nevada Democrat continued to report in Senate documents that he still owned it personally. That’s a breach of Senate disclosure rules, according to the Associated Press, which first reported the transaction details.

Reid is now considering whether he should amend his disclosure statement. . . . Unfortunately, Reid’s ethics meter only seems to work when it’s too late.

I’m not sure how bad the Reid scandal really is, but it’s clearly enough that he’s got no business going on about corruption. The truth, as I’ve said repeatedly, is that both parties are pretty corrupt, and that we need more transparency and accountability.

And I’m beginning to think that term limits might not be a bad idea, either.

Joe Gandelman, meanwhile, has a roundup and also observes: “This is the final stretch in a vital election so what’s unfolding now is what makes many independent voters stay independent voters. Some members of Reid’s party are responding in a way different to how they would respond if he was R-Nev and not D-Nev. And some Republicans and talking heads now suggest that this somehow negates, defuses, or lessens the gravity of the parade of Republican financial (and now flesh) scandals that have taken place since the Republican controlled Congress morphed into the very kind of Congress Republicans (and many voters) thought they had replaced under the politically-late Newt Gingrich. Answer to that: not one iota.”

Meanwhile, Paul Kiel at TPM Muckraker says that the AP story doesn’t add up.

UPDATE: Tom Bevan is puzzled by Harry’s hangup:

Let’s assume for the moment that the land deal is exactly what Harry Reid says it is: a simple, straightforward, perfectly legal transaction that is being misreported or blown out of proportion. Why on earth wouldn’t Reid simply state as much for the record? He could have said “we’ve been over all this before,” or he could have said “you are way off base.” Heck, he could have said just about anything. Instead, Reid hung up.

If you believe actions speak louder than words, what are we to make of the fact that the most powerful elected Democratic official in the country feels like he can just hang up in the middle of a tape recorded interview with the largest news syndicate in America?

At the very least, an outraged sense of entitlement?

THE SOUNDS OF SILENCING: Peggy Noonan looks at recent efforts to crush dissent.

AIR AMERICA RADIO FILES CHAPTER 11: Earlier reports were just a bit premature, I guess.

CURSES! DRUDGED AGAIN! A podcast interview with David Zucker about his Madeleine Albright / Kim Jong Il ad.

SANDY BERGER, back in the news: “How he managed to avoid using the word ‘pantload’ even once is beyond me, and a tribute to Andy’s professionalism.”

IN THE MAIL, Max Boot’s new book, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today. It’s quite comprehensive.

THEY PAY BUT DENY ANY GUILT: “But if the primary purpose of class-action suits is to hold companies accountable for their actions — and hopefully to learn from their mistakes — then the system is failing miserably in light of a key aspect of virtually all settlements: No one takes any blame.”

On the other hand, if a primary purpose is to make lawyers rich, they’re succeeding admirably. Woohoo!

THE REFUGEE WEAPON:

While unhappy with North Korea’s recent nuclear weapons test, there is not a lot China can do about it. This is because North Korea threatens to unleash hundreds of thousands of desperate North Korean refugees across the border, into northern China, if China applies too much pressure. Currently, the North Koreans have pretty tight control over this border, but that could be relaxed in an instant, allowing a flood of refugees into China. To counter that threat, over the last month, China has been moving more troops and police into northern China, not just to look for existing North Korean refugees, but to man more border posts, in an effort to keep out North Koreans.

Citizens or hostages? In a regime like Kim Jong Il’s there’s no difference.

JOHN TAMMES ROUNDS UP NEWS FROM AFGHANISTAN that you’ve probably missed.

A TRANSCRIPT IS NOW AVAILABLE for our podcast interview with Richard Posner regarding his book, Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency.

UPDATE: By the way, lots of people liked the music for this one, by The Nevers, and wanted to know where to get it. It isn’t available on line yet, but in response to my importuning they’ve agreed to make it available soon. I’ll let you know.

DICK ARMEY slams James Dobson.

Meanwhile, Cato says that libertarians are this year’s swing voters.

HARRY REID GETS ATTENTION: The Philadelphia Inquirer editorializes:

After the land was rezoned for a shopping center, the corporation sold it in 2004. Reid received $1.1 million in the sale, turning a neat profit of nearly $700,000 in six years.

While now insisting he did nothing wrong, Reid is also offering to make a “technical change” to his earlier ethics reports if the ethics committee so desires. Simply giving the Democratic leader a mulligan is hardly the way to handle this case. When the Senate debated ethics reforms earlier this year, Reid was out in front to demand the toughest of standards from lawmakers.

“Americans have been shocked and even disgusted by revelations of corruption in our current system by Republican lobbyists, senior Bush Administration officials, members of Congress, and former congressional staff,” Reid said in March. “The scandals have shown that some outsiders and insiders believed they could act with impunity.”

That’s how this case looks, too. Unless Reid comes up with a better explanation for this lack of disclosure, Democrats should not keep him as their leader in the new Congress in 2007.

Ouch. And the Washington Post writes:

THE BEST CASE for Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) is that he was sloppy about financial disclosure rules in accounting for a real estate deal on which he made a $700,000 profit. The more unattractive case is that the senator’s inaccurate description of the investment was an effort to disguise his partnership with a Las Vegas lawyer who’s never been charged with wrongdoing but whose name has surfaced in federal investigations involving organized crime, casinos and political bribery since the 1980s. As of now, the evidence points toward sloppiness; Mr. Reid’s friendship with Jay Brown isn’t exactly a secret in the state. But either way, an Associated Press report about Mr. Reid’s dealings doesn’t cast the senator in an attractive light. Neither does his response to the AP story, which indicates a casual disregard for the importance of accurate reporting of lawmakers’ financial affairs. . . .

Mr. Reid’s professions of transparency and full disclosure are transparently wrong. His investment was not reported in a manner that made clear his partnership with Mr. Brown. It’s true — under the inadequate financial disclosure rules — that even if Mr. Reid had listed the newly formed corporation, Patrick Lane LLC, that wouldn’t have by itself demonstrated Mr. Brown’s involvement. Nonetheless, that Mr. Reid no longer owned the land, but instead had sold it for an interest in the Patrick Lane corporation, was not some mere “technical change,” as the senator would like to brush it off. It’s an essential element of financial disclosure rules, the purpose of which is to know how and with whom public officials are financially entwined.

We need more transparency. As the Inquirer notes, Reid himself was saying that not long ago.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey has more on this story, here and here.

So does A.J. Strata. More transparency, please.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The Oklahoman comments:

Democrats in Congress wasted no time calling for House Speaker Dennis Hastert to resign in the wake of the Mark Foley scandal. They regularly rail against profits reported by Big Oil. Now that Reid has been caught with a hand in the cookie jar, so to speak, will they issue similar requests for his resignation and blistering criticism for Reid’s “obscene” profits?

Don’t bet on it.

There are differences, of course. The Foley scandal involves allegations of sexual harassment, not making money the old-fashioned (if unethical) way. And we have no problem with anyone making money on a real estate transaction.

Still, you can bet that if Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., violated ethics rules and made a killing on a land deal, his Democratic colleagues would be howling for his ouster.

Yep.

MORE: This is clearly true:

Land deals are the meat-and-potatoes of government corruption, sometimes illegal, sometimes merely smelly. Behind every crooked politician, there’s a crooked land deal. My first big story was the existential essence of the land deal: a couple of the local pols used insider advance knowledge to buy up land around a proposed freeway interchange for resale under the name of a dummy company.

The goverment builds on, buys, sells, or rezones land. Said land increases in value. Pols, friends, relatives invariably exploit the change. Harry’s part of a grand bipartisan tradition. If more reporters were covering this stuff at City Hall, there would be many fewer bad guys of either party in Congress.

Unfortunately, too many reporters think this kind of thing is boring. Maybe local political bloggers will pick up the slack.

STILL MORE: SobekPundit writes:

A very simple search on the Nevada Secretary of State web page shows that Jay Brown is the manager of Patrick Lane, LLC. So anyone who knew that Reid was involved in Patrick Lane, with the click of a few buttons, could have immediately determined that Reid was also involved with Brown — but of course Reid did not disclose his interest.

Seems like there’s a better way than this.

THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE HAS BEEN AWARDED — and, in something of a departure, it’s gone to somebody who actually deserves it:

Bangladesh’s Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank have been awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.

Mr Yunus, an economist, founded the bank, which is one of the pioneers of micro-credit lending schemes for the poor in Bangladesh.

The bank is renowned for lending money to the least well-off, especially women, so that they can launch their own businesses.

Micro-credit is far more effective at fighting poverty than big government programs. And Grameen’s efforts to empower women have made them very unpopular with Islamists, which is reason enough to applaud. As reader Kjell Hagen emails:

Business owners look to the future, not to “martyrdom”. And making women self-sustained economically helps improve equality between the sexes, which I think is an important lever to weaken the islamo-
fascist stronghold on poor, islamic countries. No wonder this bank was bombed earlier by islamic terrorists.

Indeed.

KAUS ON THE LATEST POLLS: “Grim for the GOPs, but if it were a ballgame you wouldn’t head for your car.”

THE WASHINGTON POST OUTS CHRIS WALLACE: as a registered Democrat.

(Via Bill Quick).

HUGH HEWITT HASN’T GIVEN UP ON HARRY REID: It’s a Reid-o-Rama at his place.

A BUSTED UK-US TERROR PLOT:

Dhiren Barot, of north London, planned to use a radioactive “dirty bomb” in one of a series of attacks in the UK, Woolwich Crown Court heard.

He intended to cause “injury, fear, terror and chaos”, prosecutors said.

Barot, 34, also allegedly plotted to cause explosions at several US financial buildings “designed to kill as many innocent people as possible”. . . .

Seven other men are due to face trial next year.

Glad they’re catching these guys before anything happens. Hope they keep that up.

REASONS TO APPLAUD HILLARY:

No. 1, she avoids the “Bush lied, people died” mantra, which tends to delegitimize our effort in Iraq. Instead, she says, not unreasonably, “We have to deal with the Iraq we have, not the Iraq we wish we had.” That sounds to me like someone who is thinking realistically about a responsibility that might be hers starting Jan. 20, 2009.

No. 2, she endorses the idea, which I championed long ago, of an Iraqi oil fund that would distribute part of the state’s oil profits in payments to every individual. She says that she recommended it in 2003 and that it was shot down by Dick Cheney–something I’ve never seen before in print.

“I thought it was something that could demonstrate clearly that we were not on the side of the oil companies, we were not on the side of the ruling elites–we were on the side of the Iraqi people.” Yes, exactly! She says that over the past month she has asked the president and deputy prime minister of Iraq and the U.S. ambassador there, “When are you going to get the oil deal done?”

Well, that’s two cheers. And I’m certainly on-board with the oil-trust idea. In fact, it may have started here. At least, Michael Barone got the idea here.

UPDATE: Ilya Somin cheers too, and adds: “As to whether Sen. Clinton really did urge the Bush Administration to adopt this approach back in 2003, I have no way of knowing. However, a number of people did try to persuade the Administration to embrace it at the time, including my colleague and Nobel Prize-winning economist Vernon Smith. Unfortunately, their advice was not followed.” He has some thoughts on what might be done now, too.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Larry Stevens emails:

The first I heard about the idea was in April, 2003, when I asked Milton Friedman what to do about it. He suggested selling the oil concession and putting the proceeds in exactly such a fund.

I have also read recently that Ahmed Chalabi proposed modeling a program on the Alaska oil trust in those early days.

Hmm. There are certainly some non-silly arguments against this approach — the likelihood that it would make people act like they’re on the dole being one — but it seems to me that it deserved much more attention than it got from the Administration. Any time Milton Friedman, Vernon Smith, Ahmed Chalabi, and Hillary Clinton agree on something . . . .

YOU GET INTO PAYPAL EARLY and make a pile. You get into YouTube earlier and make a bigger pile. So what do you want to do with your life? “Mostly he just wants to be a professor.”

Proving that he really is smart. (Via Who else?).

CLAYTON CRAMER looks at media innumeracy and the Lancet report. And Stephen St. Onge has further thoughts.

Megan McArdle has also read the study and is unimpressed. “Yes, I’ve read it; it’s not exactly heavy going, since it’s eight pages long and surprisingly fuzzy. They don’t break out the figures by individual province; the only clue is a map, on which Baghdad is in the basket marked “2-10 deaths per thousand per year”. This does not inspire much confidence. And the reason it is not confidence inspiring is that the fuzziness prevents comparison with figures known to be relatively reliable, such as those from Baghdad’s central morgue.” And just keep scrolling, as she has multiple posts on the subject.