INTERESTING FOLLOWUP on the John Fund column mentioned below:

The FBI’s top counterterrorism official harbors lots of concerns: weapons of mass destruction, undetected homegrown terrorists and the possibility that old-fashioned mobsters will team up with al-Qaida for the right price.

Though there is no direct evidence yet of organized crime collaborating with terrorists, the first hints of a connection surfaced in a recent undercover FBI operation. Agents stopped a man with alleged mob ties from selling missiles to an informant posing as a terrorist middleman.

The story’s a bit thin on specifics, but it’s something to watch. Of course, one thing that would drastically reduce the danger of this kind of thing would be to end the drug war . . . .

A JIHADI TAXONOMY from Matoko Kusanagi.

FOLEY UPDATE: “So it seems in the run-up to the election we won’t have to talk about Iraq and terrorism and detainees anymore. Let’s talk about sex.”

ANOTHER CIVIL RIGHTS VICTORY: Reportedly, HR 5013, which prohibits gun confiscations of the sort we saw in New Orleans after Katrina, has passed Congress.

Dave Hardy observes: “If the bill as passed tracks the earlier language, then it makes another (the fifth?) time that Congress in a preamble to a bill finds the Second Amendment to be an individual right. . . . Any person affected has a right to sue for damages, and recovery of legal fees is mandatory if they win.”

That’s excellent. Now we should try the same approach for wrong-house no-knock raids.

IN CASE YOU WERE OFFLINE THIS WEEKEND, say because you have, you know, a life or something, don’t miss our in-studio podcast interview with Michael Totten.

Coming soon: John Fund on election fraud and its remedies.

PATRICK PORTER looks at Iraqi opinion and finds an interestingly mixed bag.

ALVARO VARGAS LLOSA: “With exceptions such as China and India, the (slow) decline of the newspaper business is a worldwide trend. The big mistake that newspapers in America, Europe and Latin America have made in response to the new environment is to treat this trend as a financial and a technological challenge rather than a cultural phenomenon.”

DARFUR UPDATE: “A United Nations official who infuriated Washington by accusing the United States and Britain of ‘megaphone diplomacy’ over Sudan changed tack on Monday, praising both countries for keeping the issue alive. . . . ‘On Darfur, the two leaders, President Bush and Prime Minister Blair are moral stalwarts on what needs to be done,’ he said.” Actual accomplishments, however, seem scarce on this front.

THE JOKE’S ON OSAMA: “Al Qaeda’s fortunes have sunk so low in the Moslem world that he is being mocked, via jokes about his demise. While the Western media may not be picking up on this, al Qaeda certainly is, and is eager to do something about it.”

LIFE IMITATES Arthur C. Clarke. At least Neil Armstrong can feel vindicated.

JOHN FUND: “Congress is patting itself on the back for passing the Port Security Act last Saturday. But the day before, a House-Senate conference committee stripped out a provision that would have barred serious felons from working in sensitive dock security jobs. Port security isn’t just about checking the contents of cargo containers, it also means checking the background of the 400,000 workers on our docks.”