DEREK LOWE HAS MOVED — he’s now at Corante. Drop by and wish him well.

I’VE BEEN WOEFULLY DEFICIENT in blogging gun-related issues lately. But you might be interested in Students for the Second Amendment.

ACCORDING TO THE LOS ANGELES TIMES:

More than three-fourths of Americans — including two-thirds of liberals and 70% of Democrats — now say they support the decision to go to war. And more than four-fifths of these war supporters say they still will back the military action even if allied forces don’t find evidence of weapons of mass destruction.

Howard Veit says it’s the “liberal” numbers that are the most significant, since they mean that the only real opposition to the war consists of “the Movie Star-Media elite, Frisco Bay Area Whackos, and CNN.” This is a bit of an exaggeration, but the numbers certainly are strong.

STEVE BRILL WRITES THAT HOMELAND SECURITY IS A SUCCESS STORY: Now that’s stating a controversial thesis.

UPDATE: On the other hand, there’s this.

THIS SOUNDS LIKE DIRTY POOL:

The FBI last fall arrested six Lackawanna, N.Y., men of Yemeni origin and charged them with conspiracy and aiding a terrorist organization. All six had been to Afghanistan in early 2001 for training by Al Qaeda.

But prosecutors used dubious tactics to force the men into a plea-bargain admitting guilt to lesser charges. According to The Wall Street Journal, they threatened the defendants with “enemy combatant” status – meaning they could have been turned over to the military, deprived of counsel, and held incommunicado indefinitely.

If I recall correctly, at least some of these guys are American citizens. I don’t like this report about Mike Hawash, either.

STRATEGYPAGE has this report on Afghanistan:

The long anticipated “Taliban Offensive” is apparently underway. It’s not very impressive, with perhaps about half a dozen armed groups prowling around, attacking foreigners (troops or aid workers) and Afghans considered “un-Islamic.” Many foreign aid groups are afraid to the point of considering leaving the country. So far, the Taliban have not mustered sufficient power to threaten, much less overthrow, the government.

The number of attacks on US bases are declining. There were 27 attacks, mostly with highly inaccurate 107mm rockets, in March. Last November, there were 55, and the attacks have been declining ever since.

There’s more, but it’s pretty much all in this vein.

“VIVE CHIRAC — STOP THE JEWS!” More of, well, what we’ve come to expect from antiwar protests in France.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING STORY of life in a cult, and the escape therefrom.

MEDIA TURNS OUT TO SUPPORT THE TROOPS! Well, Media, Pennsylvania did, anyway. Dave Dilatush has pictures.

And here, courtesy of Solomonia, are pictures from a similar rally in Stoneham, Mass.

Yeah, they’re small towns. But they count, too.

I’VE FOUND NPR’S EMBEDDED WAR COVERAGE, especially that by Eric Westervelt, to be very good. Westervelt’s coverage is straightforward, and every story tells me something I didn’t know before. Given the frequent criticism that NPR gets in the blogosphere, I think that’s worth pointing out.

JOSH CHAFETZ OFFERS AN APPALLING REPORT of an effort to intimidate an antiwar student at Yale.

The story, frankly, seems hard to believe to me — not only does it not sound like Yale students to do such a thing, it doesn’t sound like the way Yale students would do such a thing if they did, if that makes sense. But Josh says he has it on good authority.

UPDATE: Bruce Bridges is skeptical:

This sounds suspiciously like an urban legend. First, never trust a story from a friend of a friend. Especially if the person telling the story assures you that this one friend is very reliable. All urban legends are passed around like that.

Second, it just sounds like an urban legend. Over the past couple of years the many reports of attacks on Muslims have often proved to be fabricated. I’m not doubting that there are some idiots out there but I wouldn’t believe this unless I heard verifiable proof.

I could be wrong of course.

We’ll see. I’m trusting Josh pretty heavily here, but I’d feel more comfortable if the victim had a name.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader points out that the Yale story sounds suspiciously similar to this account placed at Wheaton College. Of course, it’s always possible that they’re both true, though two such incidents of pro-flag ruffianism in northeastern college communities seem a bit unlikely. And there’s nothing in today’s Yale Daily News.Stay tuned.

I THINK IT MAY BE A BIT EARLY YET, but Colin Glassey is declaring victory in Iraq.

Meanwhile Howard Owens offers historical perspective on casualties.

Oh, and this piece by Max Boot on the media romance with guerrilla warfare — compared with its actual history of ineffectiveness, especially against American forces — is worth reading.

Mark Steyn, meanwhile, writes:

The way to understand this campaign is to look at the dogs of war that didn’t bark: no missile attacks on Israel and only a couple of perfunctory strikes at Kuwait; not a single Iraqi plane in the sky in defence of the homeland; the key river bridges mined with explosives but not a single one detonated; no significant land engagements, etc.

All these are big decisions which would have been taken at the top and, if there’s no top, nobody takes the decision. If you choose to believe that was the real deal on Saddam’s latest video, it doesn’t alter the fact that the Iraqis are still acting headless: everything that has not happened this last fortnight is consistent with the leadership being embedded into the rubble with a last startled look on their moustaches.

On the other hand, everything that has taken place is strictly local, freelance, improvised. . . .

But, for everyone other than media naysayers, it’s the Anglo-Aussie-American side who are the geniuses. Rumsfeld’s view that one shouldn’t do it with once-a-decade force, but with a lighter, faster touch has been vindicated, with interesting implications for other members of the axis of evil and its reserve league.

Mickey Kaus, where I first noticed this Steyn link, has much more on the “were there enough troops or not?” debate, which I think is likely to wind up a draw: Could we have beaten the Iraqi military with fewer troops? Yes. Would it have been nice to have more troops for occupation/pacification? Yes. Does that mean our force levels were right? Depends on what other threats we might have been worried about — it’s entirely possible, for example, that North Korea might have been more adventurous if we had seemed to be committing everything we had in Iraq. Who knows? Somebody had to make an informed guess, and so far the results make the guess look pretty good. That’s my take, anyway. Meanwhile, a guy in the bar last night observed that you can tell how the war is going just from glancing at the television — they used to be showing maps of Iraq, but now they’re showing maps of Baghdad.

In a related development, try not to be shocked but a German investigation suggests a Saudi government link with Al Qaeda:

GERMAN OFFICIALS SAY the terror suspects may have had a highly placed friend: a top diplomat at the Saudi Embassy in Berlin. Sources say Muhammad J. Fakihi, chief of the embassy’s Islamic-affairs branch, met frequently with the suspected terrorist cell’s leader, Ihsan Garnaoui, at Berlin’s Al Nur mosque—a notorious haven for Islamic extremists. The Germans confronted the Saudis and threatened to declare Fakihi persona non grata. “We don’t do that unless the evidence is very grave,” says a German official. Four days after the arrests, Fakihi left Germany and was supposed to have returned to Saudi Arabia. But, NEWSWEEK has learned, he never showed up. Now the Saudis want him for questioning, and officials are uncertain of his whereabouts.

Hmm. I know what I hope happened, and I know what I think happened, but I wonder what really happened?

COLLIN MAY has a lengthy and interesting essay on European politics and economics. His permalinks, unfortunately, are broken, but go here and scroll down.

PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH HAS BEEN WATCHING THE BBC. He says that Andrew Sullivan is right about BBC bias and mendacity in war coverage — and in coverage of American politics.

Jeff Jarvis, meanwhile, offers a righteous Fisking of the BBC. And coming from a major TV guy like him, it’s especially devastating.

YES, I’ve blogged less than usual this weekend, and that trend is likely to continue today. It’s been a rough couple of weeks around the InstaPundit household — not one, but two surgeries and cancer scares for close family members (both turned out OK, thankfully), plus assorted other items. Now the weather is really nice, and I’ve got a good friend from high school in town.

Yesterday, we saw my brother’s band play at “Volapalooza,” an outdoor concert on the UT campus, then visited various drinking establishments. I need to do more of that. My advice to you is to enjoy the good weather, too, if you’ve got it.

EDDIE VEDDER’S ON-STAGE ANTICS have gotten far less attention than the Dixie Chicks’ anti-Bush comments. Eric Olsen looks at what might account for the different responses.

Meanwhile, Al Barger finds himself deeply moved by Vedder’s artistic statement.

MORE disappearances in Algeria. Is somebody hiding something?

TOM BRIDGE thinks the antiwar movement is losing steam.

MEGAN MCARDLE QUOTES GERHARD SCHROEDER:

Indeed, to Schroeder’s eye, there is hardly anything worth cutting, right down to the generous dental benefits. “I do not want to return to an era when you can judge someone’s wealth by the state of their teeth,” he observed.

Megan notes that in the United States, we’ve achieved this goal:

The reason that I comment on this is that one thing you can’t tell people’s wealth by, in the dog-eat-dog dystopia that is America, is their teeth. Their sports gear, their vacations, their choice of dinner spot, yes, but not their teeth, at least not where I am.

(There’s an interesting discussion in the comment thread, too.) However, as this photograph of European Central Bank head Wim Duisenberg would seem to indicate, the Euros have achieved equality by choosing, um, a different path. . . .

UPDATE: A frightening observation.

ANOTHER UPDATE: People ask me what I know of European dentistry. Well, when I was a kid and we lived in Germany (my dad was teaching at Heidelberg) I went to a German dentist. She had the same name as a famous war criminal. I think it may have been the same woman. . . .

And my dentist in New Haven had as a major part of his practice redoing the inferior dental work of foreign students.

On the other hand, when my brother was working at the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a high-ranking diplomat was kicked in the mouth by a horse. He had repair work done by an oral surgeon in Lagos, but then returned as soon as possible to the States, on the assumption that he’d have to have everything redone by someone competent. He went to a bigshot oral surgeon in Washington, D.C., who looked at the X-rays and said “this is beautiful work. I wouldn’t change a thing.”

VIRGINIA POSTREL is fact-checking The New Yorker, and dissing Eliot Spitzer.

By the way, now that she’s got a new MT blog, instead of chiseling her HTML into stone tablets the way she used to, she’s updating more often — so you might want to check her site more often, too.

THE NEW YORK TIMES REPORTS:

It is not easy being an old lefty on campus in this war.

At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, awash in antiwar protests in the Vietnam era, a columnist for a student newspaper took a professor to task for canceling classes to protest the war in Iraq, saying the university should reprimand her and refund tuition for the missed periods.

Irvine Valley College in Southern California sent faculty members a memo that warned them not to discuss the war unless it was specifically related to the course material. When professors cried censorship, the administration explained that the request had come from students.

Here at Amherst College, many students were vocally annoyed this semester when 40 professors paraded into the dining hall with antiwar signs. One student confronted a protesting professor and shoved him.

Some students here accuse professors of behaving inappropriately, of not knowing their place.

“It seems the professors are more vehement than the students,” Jack Morgan, a sophomore, said. “There comes a point when you wonder are you fostering a discussion or are you promoting an opinion you want students to embrace or even parrot?”

Across the country, the war is disclosing role reversals, between professors shaped by Vietnam protests and a more conservative student body traumatized by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Prowar groups have sprung up at Brandeis and Yale and on other campuses. One group at Columbia, where last week an antiwar professor rhetorically called for “a million Mogadishus,” is campaigning for the return of R.O.T.C. to Morningside Heights.

Even in antiwar bastions like Cambridge, Berkeley and Madison, the protests have been more town than gown. At Berkeley, where Vietnam protesters shouted, “Shut it down!” under clouds of tear gas, Sproul Plaza these days features mostly solo operators who hand out black armbands. The shutdown was in San Francisco, and the crowd was grayer.

All this dismays many professors.

Read the whole thing. Heh.

HERE ARE PICTURES FROM A PRO-WAR RALLY IN ESTONIA.

HERE’S A TIME PIECE on warblogs.

AUSTIN BAY looks at how the warplan has worked so far. He thinks that CENTCOM’s plan is going pretty well.

I’M PULLING FOR THIS GUY: But I wouldn’t want to be the first one to ride the rocket.