IF YOU HAVEN’T CHECKED IT OUT YET, try paying a visit to The Tatler, the new group blog at Pajamas Media.

JONATHAN LAST: Why are we sending hundreds of FBI agents to Arizona when the killer’s already in jail? “For a little perspective, the FBI–which is charged with being America’s main counter-terrorism force–has just 13,000 agents. So if only 200 agents are fanned out across Arizona trying to figure out what in the world happened, then 1.5 percent of our counter-terrorism capability is being tied down by a single spree crime.”

A GOOD RULE: “My rule of thumb is a strong presumption that any law named after a victim is poor public policy enacted by legislators who confuse voting against a law with voting against an innocent person.” I’d rather have brighter legislators, but since that seems to be out of the question, perhaps a 30-day waiting period after any tragedy before bill can be introduced?

Also, could we put Congress on a “one-law-per-month” limitation? If it saves just one trillion, it’s worth it.

FLEDGLING SPACE FIRM will use old Soviet gear.

VIDEO CALLS ARE becoming ubiquitous.

JAMES TARANTO: Big Lies And Little Ones: Paul Krugman’s Only Example Turns Out To Be Fraudulent. “If the broader claim–that the ‘rhetoric’ of Republican politicians and the nonliberal media was to blame for last Saturday’s act of mass murder–is true, why can’t it be presented without false factual assertions? Krugman’s little lie undermines the big lie he and his newspaper are attempting to purvey.” Plus, Jonathan Alter’s monstrous opportunism. “Alter seems to be lacking in any sense of decency.” And is refudiated by Rahm Emanuel.

AT AMAZON, top deals in electronics.

THE MAINSTREAMING OF SURVIVALISM: Popular Mechanics on the rise of the Preppers.

BRYAN PRESTON: Schedule for today’s memorial in Tucson.

MEDICINE 2.0: Ordering Your Own Medical Tests. Just the other day I noticed a new storefront place out in West Knoxville offering “Any Lab Test Now.”

Meanwhile, my doctor told me that my next colonoscopy will be accompanied by a high-definition abdominal ultrasound. Andy Kessler’s predictions are starting to come true.

WHY THEY’D RATHER TALK ABOUT SARAH PALIN (CONT’D): Man the Lifeboats! Oil Prices Could Scuttle Recovery. I’m paying $3.25 for gas now. I notice that the big rise in gas prices hasn’t gotten much press attention, though.

DID SHERIFF DUPNIK drop the ball?

Related: Heckuva Job, Dupnik: Officers Stopped Loughner on Saturday, Did Nothing. Calling him “Sheriff Nifong” is probably a bit mean, though.

UPDATE: Dupnik subject to recall?

RUMOR: Toyota Considering Prius Pickup.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: “The term ‘blood libel’ has taken on a broad metaphorical meaning in public discourse.” You don’t say. He continues: “Although its historical origins were in theologically based false accusations against the Jews and the Jewish People,its current usage is far broader. I myself have used it to describe false accusations against the State of Israel by the Goldstone Report. There is nothing improper and certainly nothing anti-Semitic in Sarah Palin using the term to characterize what she reasonably believes are false accusations that her words or images may have caused a mentally disturbed individual to kill and maim.”

UPDATE: From the comments: “Alan Dershowitz defending Sarah Palin tells me the lunatic left is just about out of ammunition.”

Heck, it’s gotten so bad that even Jonathan Chait is defending Palin.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Neo-Neocon writes that if you look at what people were saying on Twitter, “blood libel” sounds about right.

MORE: From Jeff Dunetz at Yid With Lid:

Every time Israel acts to defend herself, the mainstream media is rich with blood libel invented by Israel’s enemies and accepted as truth by reporters.

When it comes to Governor Palin’s use of the term blood libel, it was totally justified. The progressive media created a lie about Palin causing the death of a child, Christina Taylor Greene. Their charge was blood libel just the same way as the media spreading the al Durah myth, or the way the media spread bogus charges of Israeli massacres during the recent war with Hamas in Gaza (or in the case of Reuters falsified pictures).

Allow me to suggest that the media should not try to push their progressive bias by assuming the role of policing the worldwide use of the term blood libel. They would be much better served trying to ensure that they do not become the conduits for the spread of blood libels, either be it directed toward Israeli soldiers, or conservatives in the United States.

Good luck with that.

Also, reader Eric Fettmann sends this:

Plus, remember when the left was saying that Sarah Palin was a dual-loyaltied philosemite? That was the old spin. This is the new spin.

IN LIGHT OF ALL THE DEMANDS THAT CERTAIN PEOPLE WATCH THEIR LANGUAGE, I’m reminded of how many people got their knickers in a twist over Ari Fleischer’s “watch what you say” remarks after 9/11. Fleischer’s remarks were pretty innocuous in context, but you would have thought he was Big Brother with a truncheon from the reaction of . . . well, Paul Krugman, who is now saying much more along those lines than Fleischer ever did. What could be different now? (Thanks to reader Paul Ulrich for the reminder).

UNVEILING THE 2011 Index Of Economic Freedom. “All told, 117 countries, mainly developing and emerging market economies, improved their Economic Freedom Index score. Meanwhile the U.S. dropped to 9th place.”

SCAM? Anti-Vaccine Doctor Planned to Profit from Scare.

NARRATIVE FAIL (CONT’D): “He did not watch TV. He disliked the news. He didn’t listen to political radio. He didn’t take sides. He wasn’t on the left. He wasn’t on the right.”

DAVID HARSANYI: “National Conversation” Just A Setup To Chill Speech. Usually when people talk about a “national conversation,” what they mean is “shut up and listen to me.”

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER ON PAUL KRUGMAN: Massacre, Followed By Libel. “Rarely in American political discourse has there been a charge so reckless, so scurrilous and so unsupported by evidence. . . . The origins of Loughner’s delusions are clear: mental illness. What are the origins of Krugman’s?”

Just for the record, Krugman has now gotten this treatment from the two newspapers that the NYT folks regard as peers: The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, both of which have been merciless over the past couple of days. And even within the NYT bubble, he’s been attacked pretty hard.

IN THE MAIL: Slow Down, Sell Faster!: Understand Your Customer’s Buying Process and Maximize Your Sales.

MICHAEL TOTTEN: Let Us Not Praise Pro-Terrorist Newspapers.

ROGER SIMON: The Sixties Were Violent, Not Today.

I bring it all back now for one reason — to point out that what we are going through currently, this supposed period of extreme rhetoric bemoaned by so many pundits and politicians, is but a minute radar blip compared to that era. And some of these pundits and pols are old enough to remember. Apparently, they choose not to. But to remind them, we were in an era then of genuine political assassination — RFK, MLK — not faux political assassination (actually the purposeless, near random act of a paranoid schizophrenic.) But as I recall few were calling for us to dial down the rhetoric. The anti-government forces had tons of supporters in the media, silent partners cheering on all but their most violent acts (and who knows about those). Norman Mailer, among many others, made his life and reputation in such a manner on the “steps of the Pentagon.” Hey, hey, LBJ, indeed. In a very real way the media were the secret sharers of the radical left. . . . This is one of the more clearcut demonstrations of mass projection I have seen in my lifetime.

The liberal intelligentsia of our society may not be as sick as Jared Loughner — that would be hard — but they are exhibiting a depth of neurosis that borders on a collective personality disorder. And, to play psychoanalyst, I think this disorder points straight back to unresolved issues related to the experiences of the sixties and seventies discussed above. The left’s confused and ambivalent attitude toward violence has never gone away and has now been projected out on their opponents.

Exacerbating the situation — and increasing the left’s anger — was their recent electoral defeat and the attendant failure of Keynesian economics to deal with the financial crisis. Their ideology is dissolving around them. The attempts to blame the behavior of a clinical paranoid schizophrenic on the words of right-wing politicians and pundits are the acts of desperate people.

“Desperate” being the key word.

UPDATE: Ann Althouse: If you really believed political rhetoric caused Jared Loughner’s killing spree, you wouldn’t dare to say it.

LENORE SKENAZY: Eek! A Male! Treating all men as potential predators doesn’t make our kids safer.

Last week, the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, Timothy Murray, noticed smoke coming out of a minivan in his hometown of Worcester. He raced over and pulled out two small children, moments before the van’s tire exploded into flames. At which point, according to the AP account, the kids’ grandmother, who had been driving, nearly punched our hero in the face.

Why?

Mr. Murray said she told him she thought he might be a kidnapper.

And so it goes these days, when almost any man who has anything to do with a child can find himself suspected of being a creep. I call it “Worst-First” thinking: Gripped by pedophile panic, we jump to the very worst, even least likely, conclusion first. Then we congratulate ourselves for being so vigilant.

For some meanings of “we.” People who act like the grandmother should be treated as unreasoning sexist pigs. Because they are.

BEWARE the Extremist Moderates.