I’VE BEEN A BIT UNDER THE WEATHER TODAY, so I’ve been reading Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin, which I got after a recommendation from John Scalzi. I’m about halfway through, and so far it’s quite good.

PLAME UPDATE: A trip down memory lane with the New York Times. More here.

UPDATE: More Plame retrospection, from TigerHawk.

MAJOR FIGHTING in Afghanistan: “Afghan and NATO forces killed more than 200 Taliban fighters in a major operation in southern Afghanistan, NATO said Sunday.”

Alternative MSM-style headline: “Over 200 killed in renewed Afghan violence.”

Much more Afghanistan news here, rounded up by Major John Tammes.

A LOOK AT self-defense and antisemitism in England.

JEFF GOLDSTEIN’S Citizen Journalist Report for this week is up over at Hot Air, in case you missed it.

WALID PHARES: “A prelude to future jihad in America.”

MARK STEYN: “What’s stunning is not that almost all Western media organizations reporting from the Middle East are reliant on local staff overwhelmingly sympathetic to one side in the conflict — that’s been known for some time — but the amateurish level of fakery that head office is willing to go along with.”

DANIEL GLOVER:

The netroots pride themselves on being just plain folks — you know, “people power” and all that. They are “crashing the gates” of the political establishment to change the way Washington works.

So could someone please explain why in the world Firedoglake, one of the top liberal blogs, has hired a press secretary? That’s about as establishment as you can get.

I hate to break it to Jane Hamsher, who certainly didn’t explain the logic of the move well, but real people don’t have press secretaries. And blogs shouldn’t need them.

Seems a bit, um, self-infatuated to me, even by the rather relaxed standards of the blogosphere.

PROF. KENNETH ANDERSON, IN THE NEW YORK TIMES: “It’s Congress’s war, too.” And he says Congress isn’t pulling its weight.

TIM BLAIR: “Osama fans enjoy eating out.”

AL GORE DOES STANDUP on MTV.

HELEN FINDS a TV show she likes.

A POSSIBLY USEFUL GADGET: At the grocery store today, I ran across the Energizer Quick Switch Flashlight, which uses AA, C or D batteries in the same flashlight. This seemed useful enough that I bought one and tried it out. It seemed to work fine with either AA or D cells — I didn’t have any C batteries handy to test it with. It’s a nice idea for an emergency kit — and the Energizer literature specifically sells it for that — as it will work with whatever batteries you happen to have on hand, or are able to scrounge.

Construction quality is OK, but the all-size battery tray is a bit flimsy-plasticish. Fine for an emergency kit, but not for long-term hard use, I’d say.

IF THEY HAD A HABIT OF BLOWING THINGS UP, they wouldn’t face this problem:

BRITISH Jews are facing a wave of anti-Semitic attacks prompted by Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Synagogues have been daubed with graffiti, Jewish leaders have had hate-mail and ordinary people have been subjected to insults and vandalism.

But honestly, violent antisemitism (with Israel as a threadbare excuse) has been on the rise in Europe for years. And the authorities haven’t done enough about it because, it seems, they’re too afraid of the Muslims who seem to be behind these attacks and who do blow things up.

The incentive structure that this creates will likely come back to haunt them in a number of ways. But regardless, the virus of antisemitism seems to be spreading.

UPDATE: “Hey, kidnappers are people, too!”

Related item here.

HEH. I’m hoping the answer is “desperately bored.”

THE FATTENING OF AMERICA: So the Insta-Daughter and I went for lunch at Ruby Tuesday’s. That’s not news, as we go there regularly. They had a new menu, which isn’t news either, as they get new menus on a near-monthly basis.

What’s new is that almost everything on it was fattening to the max.

They used to show the calories on the menu, along with other nutrition information. Not any more, and with good reason. A simple Cheeseburger is 1120 calories — equal to two Big Macs — and even the Turkey Burger, which you’d expect would be healthy (and which used to be) is 824 calories, more than a Whopper with cheese. And it’s that way across the menu.

I don’t mind that they have fattening stuff on the menu, but they seem to have stripped off almost all the old healthy favorites. The steaks are the lowest-calorie offerings left.

We got up and left without ordering; there wasn’t anything we wanted. We won’t be back until they change the menu again, which is too bad because we’ve always liked the place.

UPDATE: Reader Robert Crawford emails:

I’ve been on Weight Watchers for a year and a half, and occasionally go to Ruby Tuesday’s with some friends. Until the last time, it was easy enough to find things that fit my diet. The last time, I saw the same menu you did; nothing that could work. I had even planned ahead, using information about the old menu to figure out what I could get, and the menu change blew away my plans. Heck, even the salad bar was about half acceptable.

Now, my choices are as limited as a vegetarian’s.

On the other hand, Applebee’s has a whole section of diet items, including a couple of desserts.

Which is why I expect that Ruby’s will change their tune sooner rather than later. I don’t know what they were thinking. I don’t ask for tofu and sprouts (in fact, I hate those) but I’d rather not be presented with an array of things that are dripping in grease.

S.M. STIRLING’S NEW BOOK, A Meeting at Corvallis, comes out on Tuesday. It finishes up the trilogy that began with Dies the Fire, which is itself a spinoff — or mirror-image, or something — of the Island in the Sea of Time books. Anyway, I’m fortunate enough to have read it in manuscript, and it’s an excellent conclusion to the series.

Here’s an interview with Stirling that I did last year.

DARFUR UPDATE: “In the face of ongoing genocide in Darfur, the international community’s failure to accept the ‘responsibility to protect’ (that’s United Nations language, officially adopted) innocent civilian lives has taken its last, abject form. The National Islamic Front (NIF) regime in Khartoum, made up of the very men who have for more than three years orchestrated the systematic destruction of Darfur’s African tribal populations, has been told directly and unambiguously that there will be no U.N. peacemaking force without its consent.”

Kind of puts the U.N.’s disavowal of a right to self-defense in perspective, doesn’t it?

UPDATE: And it’s not just Darfur:

North Korea may be an even more egregious U.N. failure. Annan, his disgraced-and-resigned Special Envoy, his disgraced-and-fired U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, and his America-loathing U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said absolutely nothing while North Korea starved two or more million of its people to death — probably intentionally — and China played the role of enforcer of this democide. The one U.N. official to have been the least bit helpful was Special Rapporteur Vitit Muntarbhorn, and there is little indication that his words will make much of a difference in the killing fields of North Hamgyeong.

If the U.N. cannot stop a genocide — and we now know that it is not above forming corrupt relationships with those who commit genocide — one would at least hope that it would not stand in the way of people exercising what was once enshrined as a right under the U.N. Charter: self-defense.

Hope, maybe. Expect . . . no.

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH VS. HUMAN RIGHTS: “Manifestly, the work of Human Rights Watch on the Middle East is motivated less by concern for human rights than by the goal of damning Israel. Why this might be is not self-evident. But it perpetuates a long tradition of the appropriation of human rights terminology by groups and individuals whose true goals lie elsewhere, often quite far afield.”

This phenomenon is obvious and indisputable, and it has led to a drastic loss of credibility on the part of human rights groups over the past several years.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH NO-KNOCK RAIDS: Radley Balko and Joel Berger have a piece in the Wall Street Journal today:

Criminologist Peter Kraska estimates that the number of SWAT team “call-outs” soared past 40,000 in 2001 (the latest year for which figures are available) from about 3,000 in 1981. The vast majority are employed for routine police work — such as serving drug warrants — not the types of situations for which SWAT teams were originally established. And because drug policing often involves tips from confidential informants — many of whom are drug dealers themselves, or convicts looking for leniency — it’s rife with bad information. As a result, hundreds of innocent families and civilians have been wrongly subjected to violent, forced-entry raids.

Last year, for example, New York City police mistakenly handcuffed Mini Matos, a deaf, asthmatic Coney Island woman during a pre-dawn raid. While her young son and daughter burst into tears, Ms. Matos’s plea to use her asthma pump was ignored until an officer realized they entered the wrong apartment.

Home invasions can also provoke deadly violence because forced-entry raids offer very little margin for error. Since SWAT teams began proliferating in the late 1980s, at least 40 innocent people have been killed in botched raids. There are dozens more cases where low-level, nonviolent offenders and police officers themselves have been killed.

Last summer a SWAT team in Sunrise, Fla., shot and killed 23-year-old Anthony Diotaiuto — a bartender and part-time student with no history of violence — during an early-morning raid on his home. Police found all of an ounce of marijuana. This January a member of the Fairfax, Va. SWAT team accidentally shot and killed Salvatore Culosi, a local optometrist with no criminal record, no history of violence and no weapons in his home. Police were investigating Culosi for wagering on sporting events with friends.

Public officials are rarely held accountable when mistakes happen. The Culosi family has yet to be given access to documents related to the investigation of his death, including why a SWAT team was sent to apprehend him in the first place. More than a year after Diotaiuto’s death, his family too has been denied access to any of the documents it needs to move forward with a lawsuit.

What’s more, New York, after promising to reform its practices, hasn’t actually delivered:

In 2003, acting on a bad tip from an informant, police mistakenly raided the Harlem home of Alberta Spruill, a 57-year-old city worker. The violence of the incursion literally scared Spruill to death; she died of a heart attack at the scene. The raid spurred public outrage, calls for reform, and promises from the city to change its ways. The NYPD published new guidelines calling for more reliability when taking tips from informants. The city also promised greater vigilance in conducting surveillance and double-checking addresses before a SWAT team was sent in.

But later, during the course of a lawsuit stemming from another, mistaken raid — in 1992, on corrections officer Edward Garrison, his elderly mother and two young daughters — the city declared that all of the post-Spruill reforms it had promised were merely discretionary, not enforceable in court, and could be revoked at will by any future mayor or police commissioner.

In any case, botched raids have not stopped. In 2004, police arrested a Brooklyn father of two in a drug raid and held him for six months at Riker’s Island. In March of this year they dropped all the charges, conceding that he had been wrongly targeted. The man’s lawyer called it the worst case of malicious prosecution she’d ever seen. Also in 2004, police mistakenly raided the home of Martin and Leona Goldberg, a Brooklyn couple in their 80s, when an informant provided bad information. “It was the most frightening experience of my life,” Mrs. Goldberg later said. “I thought it was a terrorist attack.”

I’d like to see federal legislation making the officers, and the officials who supervise them, strictly liable in all such cases, without benefit of official immunity. No-knock raids should be reserved only for cases where there’s an immediate threat to people’s lives.

Link to the full piece should work for non-subscribers for the next week.

MORE UK TERROR ARRESTS:

Fourteen people were arrested in London overnight on suspicion they were involved in training and recruiting for acts of terrorism, police said Saturday.

Police said the arrests were not linked to last month’s alleged plot to bomb U.S.-bound passenger jets or to the July 2005 attacks on London’s transport network. . . .

Peter Clarke, head of Metropolitan Police anti-terror efforts, said police and intelligence agents were now attempting to track thousands of people believed to be directly or indirectly involved in terrorism, according to comments made public Friday.

The threat from homegrown terrorism is increasing in Britain, he told the BBC in an interview to be broadcast Sept. 3, an advance transcript said.

“What we’ve learnt since 9/11 is that the threat is not something that’s simply coming from overseas into the United Kingdom,” Clarke said. “What we’ve learned, and what we’ve seen all too graphically and all too murderously, is that we have a threat which is being generated here within the United Kingdom.”

Nice to see them recognizing that. There’s a roundup of blog reactions on these arrests here.

UPDATE: More thoughts here, including this observation: “We aren’t creating terrorists in Iraq. The manufacturing process began long ago, and in one case noted at the end of this excerpt, the terrorist nested in Great Britain went to Iraq to ‘blow himself up.'”

I GUESS IT’S EASY to be for raising the minimum wage, when you’re not going to pay that much anyway.

UPDATE: Matt Edens finds something else interesting in the article:

From that Madison article about campaign workers making less than minimum wage linked on Captain’s Quarters:

“Grassroots Campaigns, a Boston-based for-profit company with operations in 18 U.S. Cities…”

Well, “AstroTurf” is trademarked.

RED CROSS AMBULANCE DRIVER KILLED: But nobody cares, because Israel didn’t do it. Heck, there weren’t even photoshopped images making it look as if Israel was involved, which is kind of hard to believe, really. Is Reuters falling down on the job?

TOUCH THE MOTHMAN’S BUTT — it’s good luck!

NEWS ON WMD IN IRAQ: “For those keeping score, this most recent discovery raises the total number of chemical weapons found in Iraq since 2003 to more than 700.” Follow the link for more information.