WELL, THAT’S NOT MUCH, but I’m blogging from an Internet cafe, and I’ve got to get back to the hotel so I can go to dinner. More later, maybe.

AL QAEDA’S FUNDING MAY BE more narrowly based than we realized:

WASHINGTON — The United States has identified the sources of Al Qaida funding and found they were fewer in number than earlier estimated.

Officials said U.S. intelligence has determined that Al Qaida is supported by 12 financiers, most of them Saudis. They said the Bush administration is sharing the findings with Washington’s allies in NATO and the European Union.

Hmm. Twelve tragic accidents? No, we don’t do that sort of thing anymore. Do we?

BRAD DELONG IS NO ED LAZARUS, according to Juan Non-Volokh.

WILL VEHRS BLOGS from near the scene of the latest sniper attack.

And Jim Henley, of course, has more.

DEBKA reports that Bin Laden is hiding out in Saudi Arabia. This isn’t a huge shock to me, if it turns out to be true, since we’ve recently learned that Saudi money is still flowing to Al Qaeda.

Of course, it may not be true at all. But it’s certainly the case that connections between Saudi Arabia and the Ladenites remain too close for a country that purports to be an ally. Can you say “Hashemite?”

I knew that you could.

OKAY, ONE MORE: An interesting roundup of items on nanotechnology and the environment, along with a report that European spending on nanotechnology research is nearly double U.S. spending. Both at Nanodot.

BLOGGUS INTERRUPTUS: I’ll be on travel for most of today, so blogging will be limited. I’m taking the laptop, though, and will update as time and internet connections allow.

ANOTHER ARMED CITIZEN THWARTS CRIME — though I guess the NRA won’t be touting this case too strongly:

A would-be car thief died Friday after he was shot by the car’s owner, a camouflage-clad hunter toting a bow and arrow, police said.

The thief was moments from a clean getaway when the hunter happened upon his car, police said. The man told the hunter he had a gun and threatened to kill him, said Sgt. T.E. Kiser of the Harris County Sheriff’s Department homicide division.

The hunter drew his bow and shot at the man, hitting him in the hip and buttocks area.

Is there a National Bowmen’s Association? (Via Rachel Lucas).

UPDATE: In a different vein of nontraditional armed citizenry, here’s a BBC story on the Mount Holyoke Chapter of the Second Amendment Sisters.

WHY AM I NOT SURPRISED AT THIS:

OSAMA BIN LADEN has been linked to the Bali bombing by the testimony of one of his senior lieutenants.

The man has told CIA interrogators that thousands of dollars from an account controlled by Bin Laden was used to buy explosives by the Islamist group suspected of the attack.

A confidential American intelligence document, seen by The Sunday Times, reveals that $74,000 (nearly £48,000) was transferred from an account in the name of Sheikh Abu Abdullah Emirati, one of Bin Laden’s pseudonyms, to pay for three tons of explosives bought from the Indonesian military.

That it’s possible to buy three tons of explosives illegally from the Indonesian Army without anyone noticing isn’t exactly comforting.

ANOTHER HUMAN RIGHTS TRIUMPH for the Bush Administration: Saddam is apparently freeing all political prisoners in response to criticism of his regime as dictatorial:

The amnesty and the referendum come amid attempts by the Iraqi Government to rally domestic and international opposition to US demands for a change of regime in Baghdad.

In his UN speech on Iraq last month, US President George W Bush demanded that the leadership end internal oppression in Iraq, as well as stop its alleged programme to develop weapons of mass destruction.

You get more with a kind word and a gun, than with a kind word alone. Especially when dealing with crazed dictators.

A POSITIVE BLOG REVIEW of Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine. “Let me state for the record that I liked Bowling for Columbine a lot. It’s hilariously funny in a number of places, and highly entertaining.”

ANOTHER SHOOTING outside D.C.

UPDATE: Meryl Yourish comments. And Jim Henley and The Guardroom have more.

REID STOTT ON COPY PROTECTION: “It’s not really about copyright at all. It’s about total control over distribution, for up to a century. Copyright is just the bludgeon they use to try and get it. They don’t ‘create’ anything. They just control it.”

UH OH. This new legislation could be bad news for warbloggers. . . .

MAUREEN DOWD’S LATEST is up, in which she calls President Bush the “Boy Emperor,” suggests he’s stupid, and closes with a reference to a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. (A Juicy Juice box plays a role, too.) I leave it as an exercise for the reader to compare this effort with Josh Chafetz’s The Immutable Laws of Maureen Dowd.

UPDATE: For those readers inclined to cheat on this exercise, Josh Chafetz has his own post on the piece. Excerpt:

I just read Maureen Dowd’s column for Sunday, and I just don’t know what to say. She’s gone way beyond the Immutable Laws and made a precipitous plunge into utter incoherence. Can anyone, for instance, tell me what the hell is going on in this paragraph?

Not me.

GARETH PARKER points out what we’re fighting.

UPDATE: Then there’s this from Andrea Harris.

DID ABC NEWS GET AN IRAQI VOTER KILLED? A reader asks that very question, and sends this from an ABC story:

However, we did find one man who voted “no.” We followed him outside to ask why. “You are mistaken, I voted ‘yes’ for our great leader Saddam Hussein,” he told the government minder who is our translator.

Did he lie to use? Was he scared of the minder? Did he mistakenly vote “no?” We’ll never know. But he was the nearest thing to a dissenting voice that we found in Kerbala; a city that rebelled against Saddam in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War.

That rebellion was brutally crushed and, if appearances are to be believed, none of its spirit remains.

But why did our dissenting voter’s ballot not show up in the tally announced this morning? The 100 percent result was not 99.9 recurring that was rounded up for ease. Iraq claims that every single person eligible to vote voted for Saddam.

I’d be interested in a followup. . . .

I CAME TO IT A BIT LATE, but this Iraqi presidential ballot is pretty funny.

IT’S SKBUBBA’S 6-MONTH BLOGGIVERSARY! Drop in and wish him well.

BRIAN DOHERTY says that Michael Moore represents the impotence of the American Left:

The documentary is, on its surface, a meditation on American gun viol