THREATENING AN ACADEMIC for linking to an article critical of the RIAA. Sounds like more of the Orwellian thuggery we’ve come to expect.

VIA A POST AT SAMIZDATA on The Dangerous Book for Boys, a recommendation for another book: How to Be the Best at Everything. And it comes in a girls’ edition, too.

UPDATE: Link to the girls’ edition was bad before. Fixed now.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: “This country was built on biased reporting.”

A NATION OF SID SAWYERS?

CRITICIZING the Boston Globe’s foreign policy stance.

THIS IS INTERESTING: “A man widely believed to be the model for the smiling chef on Cream of Wheat boxes finally has a grave marker bearing his name.”

JAMES WEBB CAPITOL GUN UPDATE:

Sen. James Webb (D-Va.) said he owns the gun that an aide was arrested for carrying into the U.S. Capitol complex in March.

“It’s my gun,” Webb told the Richmond Times-Dispatch last week.

Webb previously had refused to say whether the gun was his. The Washington Post reported at the time of the incident that the aide, Phillip Thompson, told authorities that the weapon belonged to Webb.

Thompson was arrested on an illegal handgun charge when he carried the loaded pistol and two other loaded magazines in a briefcase into the Russell Senate Office Building. A federal prosecutor later dropped the charge.

Webb said little about the incident in March.

“It was a matter under legal consideration, and I was precluded from saying anything,” Webb told the Richmond newspaper. “And I hope you’ll understand that in matters of self-defense up here, it doesn’t do anybody’s safety a lot of good by talking about this stuff. We’re pretty vulnerable up here.”

So the gun was Webb’s all along. Why didn’t he say so? I can’t see what would have “precluded” him from stepping up and admitting that it was his gun.

And as for feeling “pretty vulnerable” despite the presence of the Capitol Police — well, lots of Americans are a lot more vulnerable than Senators. How about sponsoring a national concealed-carry bill, Senator Webb?

UPDATE: More thoughts from SayUncle.

MICHAEL MOORE’S SICKO: Available online for free, apparently with Moore’s blessing.

A RISING TIDE OF “HONOR KILLINGS” IN BRITAIN among Muslim immigrants. Cracking down on these — hard — is an important way of promoting assimilation. But will British authorities be willing to be tough on these killers? (Via Tim Blair, who notes grovelling.)

WE’VE HEARD THESE BEFORE: Warnings of Internet overload.

SO NIFONG’S DISBARRED, but what about the Gang of 88?

MICKEY KAUS notes that the Democrats are abandoning the working class:

Weren’t Democrats (especially liberal Democrats) the people who wanted chicken pluckers–and others doing lousy jobs at the bottom of the pyramid–to be paid $10 an hour? Yet here we have the putative lion of liberalism declaring this modest goal (less than $3/hour above the new scheduled minimum wage) to be impossible. Employers just won’t do it! They’ll hire illegals instead. . . . Does anyone on the Left think the Grand Bargain will on average improve the earnings of those Americans now making $6, $7, $8 and $9 an hour?

If Lou Dobbs were running for President, this wouldn’t be happening.

UPDATE: He’d be making a stink about this, too.

AN ISRAELI IN RAMALLAH, listening to Fatah:

Wearing Ralph Lauren polo shirts and speaking fluent Hebrew, they told hair-raising stories of teenage boys presumed loyal to Fatah being flung from the fourteenth floor of office buildings, their hands shackled and their mouths taped shut. One man said that the Hamas fighters had behaved worse than the Nazis. All this should be taken with a grain of salt, of course: Nazi comparisons are flung around with abandon in the Middle East, and we have not heard from the Hamas fighters what the Fatah guys may or may not have done to them. The unspoken message, though, is interesting: suddenly Fatah represents the reasonable, civilized Palestinians. They speak Hebrew, they look like us and they sound like us, and Islamist militants threaten them just as they threaten Israel.

Uh huh. Read the whole thing. There’s video, too. But I can’t resist excerpting this:

A few dozen Fatah-aligned fighters had shown up in the square, most traveling on the back of pick up trucks. They wore combat-style uniforms, although some wore street shoes instead of army boots. Their faces were covered in ski masks and they brandished weapons in what the Times called a “a show of force by Fatah.” That sounds very dramatic, of course, but the reality was not very impressive: again, I felt as though I were watching a parody of machismo that seemed a bit silly, if not comic.

Other than stare into the camera and pose, the fighters didn’t do anything at all. It was all pure theatre: I listened and watched as the various foreign television reporters positioned themselves in front of the masked gunmen and spoke seriously to the cameras about the rising tension in Ramallah, trying their best to make it sound as if they were in the middle of a war zone. But if their cameramen had panned out for a wider shot they would have shown crowds of mostly young men hanging around, eating snacks, buying cold drinks from vendors, and taking photos with their mobile phones. There was no sense of fear or menace at all. I even saw one photojournalist, who works for an American newspaper, giggling a bit as she aimed her camera at a masked fighter who was posing as if he were having his portrait painted, his eyes stonily focused on the horizon.

An awful lot of middle eastern photo-ops fit this description. Plus, Yoga in Ramallah.

MARK STEYN: “With the benefit of hindsight, it should have been obvious that the first female imam would be an Episcopalian…”

Advantage: Scrappleface!

CHARLES STROSS IS pretty negative about the prospects for space colonization. Rand Simberg thinks he’s too negative. I think it’s a function of technology, and the limits and costs where that’s concerned aren’t discernable yet.