In one of her most fascinating interviews to date (dutifully transcribed by Riehl World View) Ann Coulter reveals Bill Clinton's deep dark gay secret. The proof? Why, it's his blatant heterosexuality, dummy!

DEUTSCH: Off the air, you were talking about Bill Clinton. Is there anything you want to say about Clinton? No?

Ms. ANN COULTER: No.

DEUTSCH: OK. All right. Did you find him attractive? Was that what it was?

Ms. COULTER: No!

DEUTSCH: You don't find him attractive?

Ms. COULTER: No. OK, fine, I'll say it on air.

DEUTSCH: Most women find him attractive.

Ms. COULTER: No.

DEUTSCH: OK, say it on air.

Ms. COULTER: I think that sort of rampant promiscuity does show some level of latent homosexuality.

(Via Dean Esmay.)

Obviously, the most elementary logic dictates that such people are latent heterosexuals.

What that means is that Exodus International and others interested in "reparative therapy" for gays should look no further then the nearest gay bath houses and sex clubs.

Who knew?

Never have I been fooled for so many years, by so many!

UPDATE: Many years ago, the National Lampoon spoofed the gay conversion theme with Anita Bryant's "Homo No-Mo" course:

Of course, what Ann Coulter proposes is the inverse, so maybe it should be reworked, and called "Ann Coulter's Hetero-Shmetero" or something.

I don't have time for photo-shopping today, but I'm open to any ideas that will benefit humanity.

They might as well have!

Anyway, this dance video (which makes me want to resort to wisecracks about the "gay steppes") is quite funny:

(If it won't play here, try this link.)

Speaking of Genghis Khan, did you know that Mongolia recently renamed its airport the "Genghis Khan International Airport"? I didn't know that until today's dance routine.

That's Entertainment!

(We can all rape and pillage together, in a manner reminiscent of Genghis Khan.)

There's a reason the federal government is dragging its feet on illegal immigration. It's a wildly expensive and complicated problem with the potential to erupt in a race war.

One of the things that always makes me sit up and take notice is when I see people on right and the left agreeing on something. In this case, it's agreement on the possibility of a domestic war over immigration. People on the right don't tend to use the term "race war" so much as "civil war." (Tacitus looked at this issue in April, but most conservatives are quite uncomfortable with it.)

I don't think the terminology is important so much as the idea that any such war might take place.

I'm generally pro-war where it comes to national defense, but where it comes to civil war, I am so vehemently against the idea that I'd do almost anything to stop it. Terrible harm came from the last Civil War. I disagree with people who say it was "worth it," as I think it stands as a warning. A second American Civil War is almost too awful to contemplate. That's why I've devoted so much time to opposing that thing we call a "Culture War" because the rhetoric gets so heated that it often strikes me as a sort of "cold" Civil War. (In 2003, cultural conservative Dennis Prager opined that the Culture War was already a de facto "Second Civil War" -- and he wasn't even considering immigration.)

I don't care what anyone thinks about immigration; it does not justify another American Civil War. (Or "race war" which is pretty much the same thing.)

Fortunately, right now it's still a war of rhetoric and hyperbole.

An unwinnable war of words.

(And fortunately, as long as people are talking, there's the unintended consequence of mutual appeasement.)

Pit bulls are incredibly strong dogs, as anyone who's ever owned one can attest. Coco's ability to leap into the air is a constant source of amazement to me; if a tantalizing object is dangled before her, she can jump from a standing position to a height of over six feet. When I play fetch with her, she can catch the stick or frisbee before it hits the ground -- as far as I can throw it. Nothing particularly heroic about any of it, although I don't doubt that under the right circumstances, Coco would display what we'd anthropomorphically call heroism. That's because the strength of these dogs is matched only by their utter devotion and determination.

If you are a good person and have raised a good dog, knowing that you have a dog that would not hesitate to lay down its life for you is very touching. Humbling, even.

The problem, of course, is that bad people raise bad dogs, and the dogs don't realize they're bad, as they're just doing what dogs do based on centuries of tailoring their survival to living with man. If you're a dog, your identity is generally tied to that of your owner. Which is why it so horrifies me to see an otherwise good dog in the wrong hands. It's more irritating than reading about "gun violence," because in the case of a bad guy misusing a gun, the gun is not a victim, whereas a misused animal is. Frankly, if we consider the number of pit bulls owned by lowlife scum, what amazes me is that there are as few incidents as there are.

Quite ironically, the fact that there are so few attacks on people is an unintentional but logical byproduct of the dogs' historic background of being pitted against bulls, bears, and other dogs for sport. While the medieval brutes who bred these canine gladiators were anything but kind, they could not tolerate any dog with the slightest inclination to attack humans, for otherwise how could they have pitted them? Under the rules which evolved in dogfighting, the dogs had to be handled routinely, picked up, separated, then faced off to determine whether a dog was a coward, or whether it would walk across the "scratch" line to take hold of the other animal. Dogs that turned away, or tried to jump the pit were considered defective, as were dogs which displayed any tendency to turn and bite humans -- even in the heat of combat. The result over the centuries was a dog that was downright amiable, even clownish -- in many cases almost ridiculously so.

Now, this is not just my opinion -- many, many students of the breed have noticed this over and over again. (A fascinating New Yorker piece explores the phenomenon in detail.) It seems like a paradox to people, but it isn't. I've always suspected that the "natural born entertainers" were more likely to survive the sadism and cruelty which inhered to these blood sports -- perhaps out of pity, perhaps simply because people enjoy being entertained. Like it or not, the cruel spectacles were also circus performances, and people like circuses, and shows. (Shades of WWF, perhaps?)

There's a famous account of a huge pit bull with rippling muscles which was being judged in a dog show, and which had patiently stood at attention and put up with the usual poking, probing and gawking. This he bore with unflappable patience and dignity until suddenly a small and yappy Chihuahua (probably suffering from an inferiority complex) broke loose from somewhere and attacked the pit bull in a total frenzy. People were afraid the little dog would be killed with one bite, but the pit bull's owner/handler ordered him to be still. The Chihuahua was really aggressive, though, and although the bites weren't having any physical effect, the onslaught of this tyrannically impotent rage was nonetheless ruffling the pit bull's sense of pride, and he kept looking reproachfully at his master, as if pleading with him to do something. This was many years ago, when people still thought this sort of thing was great entertainment, and as neither dog was being hurt, the crowd was laughing uproariously (at both dogs' expense).

Finally the pit bull could take no more, and he devised a plan to put an end to the suffering. Firmly but gently, he took hold of the Chihuahua by the scruff of the neck, lifted him off the ground and quite deliberately, walked over to the nearest trash can, got up on his rear legs, and carefully placed the Chihuahua in the trash!

Something like that requires what we humans would call premeditation and deliberation.

While putting a Chihuahua in a trashcan might not be what most of us would call heroism, I think this pit bull confrontation with a bear would be:

An Ontario man who killed a 200-pound black bear with a hunting knife says his faithful dog saved his life -- twice.

Tom Tilley, 55, of Waterloo, Ont., had been portaging last Thursday in northern Ontario near Wawa with his five-year old American Staffordshire, Sam.

He said they were walking toward the beginning of the portage to retrieve the canoe when he heard Sam start to growl.

"And I turned behind me and 20 feet behind me there was this black bear coming up the trail, sneaking up behind me," he said.

"If Sam hadn't growled, I may not have known until it was too late."

Tilley's first instinct was to try and make lots of noise and make himself appear bigger. He also started to slowly walk backwards, but nothing seemed to be scaring off the bear.

Suddenly, the bear took off down the portage path, ran through the brush and came onto the portage trail behind Tilley -- cutting off his escape route.

"At that point I kind of realized I might be in a bit of trouble."

"The bear seemed to me to be acting aggressive. I'm not a big guy and I could very well easily be prey."

At that point, his dog Sam placed himself perpendicular to the bear, across the path. The bear dug its teeth into the dog's back, and Tilley said he became enraged.

"I love my dog very much, and my first thought was, 'You're not going to kill my dog'."

"The momentary distraction that Sam provided to take the bear's attention away from me gave me the opportunity to run behind the bear, straddle its back and begin to stab it.

"I kept stabbing until it was dead.

There's more here about the dog's recovery:

WATERLOO - Since the swell of national attention highlighted the heroism of Tom Tilley and his dog Sam, offers have flooded in to pay for the dog's medical treatment.

Some callers want to nominate Sam for a canine hero award.

[...]

Sam was wounded when the bear clamped down on his back, tearing away skin and leaving several puncture wounds.

Since the incident last Thursday, Tilley and Sam have been inundated with media requests from across the country, as well as with calls and e-mails from well-wishers.

"Personally, I'll be glad when it dies down," the soft-spoken Tilley said Monday.

Sam is recovering well.

"We went to the vet today. We were hoping to get some of the tubes out from the surgery, but they're staying in for a little while longer."

These remarkable dogs still provide mass entertainment, even though we call it "news."

Last of the weekend photos.

Some contemplation:

And some action:

I like it when excitement appears out of nowhere!

now SHOW ME THE MONEY!

Update: Explanation

Updatus Secundus: So what if Mel Gibson is not Tom Cruise?

Update Tertius: Bee double ee double are you in? Beerrun. That's the spirit!

Now bring me the wenches. This is how we schnell!

Update Yonban: This is madness. He's going to attack? Yes. He's defeated. He must accept his shame. Kill them. All of them. Now. My horse! [phantom elipses]. Fire! Ute! Ready! Aim! Fire! Fire at will!

Non-update Update: You have your honor again. Let me die with mine. [I will miss our conversations].

According to police reports, a drunken Mel Gibson apparently stated that "the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world."

Would alcohol make him say something like that? Possibly, but that does not mean the alcohol put the thoughts in his mind. From my experience with alcohol (and I've had a lot) alcohol doesn't work that way. It loosens inhibitions, and causes you to let slip things you might later regret. Alcohol can cause great embarrassment, but usually because it causes a loss of control. Loss of control means an inability to control impulses -- but the impulses are there.

On the other hand, we all say things we do not mean, whether drunk or sober. I've said all kinds of stupid things.

I think Gibson should own up to what he said, and discuss it. If he thinks the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world, I'd like to hear his explanation. If he doesn't think they are, I'd like to hear him say that. I'm still bothered by the fact that he failed to state whether or not he disagreed with the ravings of his anti-Semitic father, because under the circumstances (this was when "The Passion" was released), I think he had a responsibility. (So did David Bernstein.)

And under these circumstances, I don't think it's enough to simply say that he said "things" he doesn't believe:

“I acted like a person completely out of control when I was arrested, and said things that I do not believe to be true and which are despicable. I am deeply ashamed of everything I said, and I apologize to anyone I may have offended.”

I'd really like to know what the sane and sober Mel Gibson thinks about those he calls "the Jews" -- and not what a professional damage controller might have scripted for him. If he can't say what he really thinks, I'm afraid I'm going to have to doubt the sincerity of his apology.

Bear in mind that none of this has anything to do with the drunk driving charge, of which Gibson's guilt will depend on the evidence. And of course, there's nothing illegal about being an anti-Semite, blaming the Jews for all the wars in the world, or just blaming the Jews for some wars.

I'd like him to just tell the truth.

UPDATE: Power Line's Scott Johnson thinks Gibson's drunken remarks support the qualms he had about "The Passion":

If one is inclined, as I am, to the view that the personal beliefs of artists may be relevant to an interpretation of their works -- a view that the New Critics discounted as "the intentional fallacy" -- Mel Gibson's alleged drunken tirade provides some evidence to support my qualms regarding the film. Gibson's statement on his arrest seems to lend credence to the report of his drunken tirade.

MORE: When I wrote about "The Passion," Snopes.com had an article about the anti-Semitism of Hutton Gibson, Mel Gibson's father. The Snopes page has been pulled, and so has its archive (which the Wayback Machine gives as a "BLOCKED SITE ERROR.")

UPDATE: Via Dean Esmay, Doc Rampage offers a partial defense of Gibson:

obviously Gibson is special. Almost anyone else could yell anything and none of their friends, family, coworkers, or customers will ever know what they said. By contrast, now that it has become public, all of Gibson's friends, family, coworkers, and customers (moviegoers) are going to know what Mel Gibson said. The consequences for including that information in the report are likely to be far, far more damaging to Gibson than they would be to most other people.

He's still a great director, though. Drunken anti-Semitic remarks do not alter or undo his work.

And suppose he turns out to be a genuine anti-Semite. He would deserve the strongest criticism -- even condemnation -- for it.

But take Wagner's undisputed anti-Semitism. Isn't that a separate issue from the quality of his operas?

UPDATE: Kofi Annan look out! Mel Gibson may be after your job! (Via Glenn Reynolds.)

I'm beginning to think that "gun violence" is the Philadelphia Inquirer's biggest issue. It's gotten to the point where nearly every Sunday's front page is devoted to this tedious topic, with nothing new to say. Yes, Philadelphia has a huge crime problem, and many people are shooting each other.

There is a criminal culture which believes in using guns to settle disputes, and to the Inquirer (as well as people who agree with them) this means guns are the problem.

In today's piece (part of a series titled "A Summer Under the Gun"), a local professor often said to be an expert in these matters makes a cultural observation which is hardly new, but which I think illustrates a serious problem posed by any attempt at analysis:

The main job on the Street is drug dealer.

"By selling drugs," wrote University of Pennsylvania professor Elijah Anderson, an authority on urban street life, young inner-city males "have a chance to put more money into their pockets than they could get by legal means, and they present themselves to peers as hip, in sharp contrast to the square image of those who work in places like McDonald's and wear silly uniforms."

Another factor the Inquirer has pointed out time and time again is the inescapable fact that having a gun makes people (including criminals) more powerful than if they didn't have a gun:

In prison for armed robbery, Antwian comes across as a mild-mannered 19-year-old who doesn't talk hard-core street lingo. He said his home life was rough, with harsh physical discipline.

Antwian didn't fully embrace the Street. But when problems arose, guns were easy to get. A friend whose father had a gun collection got him a chrome 9mm Ruger to deal with some guys in his Northeast Philadelphia neighborhood who "kept trying to roll me."

Challenged to fight one day, Antwian pulled out his Ruger from his waistband and placed it on the ground for all to see.

"Nobody wanted to roll on me then," Antwian said.

He was emboldened. Following an altercation with some guys at a park, he returned with the Ruger and started firing to scare them.

"After that, everybody at the school whispered about it," he recalled. "A couple girls wanted to associate with me."

He now had a reputation.

Or doesn't that matter? Anyway, if you read on, his criminal irresponsibility gets worse and worse. (And silly logical me, I don't even think it's the fault of the gun "availability"):

He did a little drug dealing in Germantown before moving to the Northeast, but "it wasn't really me. I just did it to get a quick couple dollars."

He did try to work. He cut grass in his neighborhood. He sold knickknacks out of a catalog. He stocked shelves at a Rite Aid, served as a cashier at a women's clothing store, cooked and waited tables at a rib joint in Manayunk. He worked at McDonald's for a month and got fired for showing up late. His last and best-paying job was in construction: $250 a week under the table.

"But I was smoking so much weed I'd be broke every day," he said.

He decided, "I need something right now, something I could do tonight."

Antwian, then 17, had given the Ruger to a friend who'd sold it. So, he paid $100 to a construction coworker who was a crack addict for a sawed-off shotgun. Then, with a friend, Antwian said, he committed three robberies that night.

Wearing a black flight jacket with five shells in an upper-arm pocket, Antwian approached his first victim, an older man, and pulled out the 12-gauge.

"You know what this is!" he announced. His friend patted the victim down and found $200. They told him to turn around and they ran off.

"We was like, ‘Damn, it was that easy?' " Antwian recalled.

For the next six weeks, Antwian committed five more stickups before his arrest and conviction on the last one.

"It was like my mind-frame shut down," he said. "If I wanted to do something, I just did it."

That's the whole problem in a nutshell. For some people, it is self apparent that it is an argument for gun control, while for other people it is a reason to be armed.

To me, the fact that there are people who'd hold a gun to my head and demand money is a good reason to be armed.

Yet to others, the presence of people who behave that way is an argument against anyone having guns. Even law abiding people.

I don't see any way to bridge this hopeless gap.

It reminds me of the sad fact I discussed yesterday: some people would take Coco away from me because bad people own pit bulls.

I was gone all day yesterday and most of the night, which only caused me to neglect personal business around here, so now I have to get caught up with non-blog-related matters. (It's surprising -- even shocking -- how much time blogging can take.) Hopefully, I'll have some time later today.

(That looks almost unattainable, doesn't it?)

Dogs with a pit bull "appearance" are illegal in Kansas City, Kansas:

Under the city’s ordinances, it is illegal to have any dog with predominant characteristics or appearance of Staffordshire bull terriers, American pit bull terriers, American Staffordshire terriers or any combination of those breeds.

From the looks of this story, it doesn't appear that pit bull ban is working very well:

KANSAS CITY, Kan. -- Charges were filed Friday in connection with a pit bull attack that killed a 71-year-old woman Thursday.

Police said Derrick D. Lee, 32, was charged with involuntary manslaughter. He is being held on $100,000 bond.

Officers said Lee owns the house next to Jimmie May McConnell. She was in her garden Thursday morning at 3100 Longwood Ave. when a dog jumped the fence and mauled her. She was taken to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

Officials said McConnell had a heart condition, and she couldn't recover from the stress of the dog attack.

Preliminary autopsy results indicated McConnell died of a cardiac arrhythmia brought on by the trauma of the attack, Wyandotte County coroner Alan Hancock said.

McConnell had extensive bites on her limbs and torso, "but not one of the bites were such that you could say one was responsible for her death," Hancock said.

The bite marks will be examined by an expert to determine if more than one dog attacked McConnell.

Animal-control officers tranquilized the dog in McConnell's back yard and took it away. A second dog was taken from the house next door.

Police would not confirm that the dogs were the ones responsible and were trying to determine the dogs' breed. But neighbors identified them as coming from a home next to McConnell's and believed they were pit bulls.

Lee, on his way into court for a hearing in an unrelated case Friday afternoon, told The Kansas City Star he had nothing to do with the attack.

Lee said he had lived at the house where the dogs were found but hadn't been staying there for three months. He would return to the house to feed one of the dogs and another dog - the one involved in the attack - was a stray that would come up and steal food. He didn't know who the dog belonged to and thought it lived by a nearby creek, Lee said.

Police said Lee was arrested at the Wyandotte County Courthouse where he had appeared on unrelated charges of possession of crack cocaine and battery of an officer.

"She was so scared of the dogs. This has gone on for over a year. Those dogs have acted like they want to come through that fence," Chris McConnell told KMBC. "She worked in the garden every day, and they would growl and bark aggressively at her. She said, 'One day, one of those dogs are going to get me.' They finally got her."

KMBC reported that this wasn't the first time that neighbors have had problems with this neighbor's dogs. According to a representative with the Unified Government of Wyandotte County, animal control officers found two pit bulls at the neighbor's home in 2004.

Code enforcement officers deemed the neighbor's house uninhabitable because there are no utilities hooked up inside.

Pit bulls are banned in Wyandotte County, Kan., where the attack took place.

Police said they have not been able to contact the dog's owner. Officials said they are investigating the case as a homicide. (Emphasis added.)

To recap, a dog neglected by a[n alleged] thug in a derelict house roams the streets and terrifies the neighbors, finally attacking one who later dies of heart failure.

And the focus is not on the [alleged] criminal, or on how he treated the animal he won't admit he owned. No. The focus is on a particular breed, so that dogs can be identified and taken away from law-abiding responsible people.

Based on their "appearances," of course.

I'm sorry, but the illogic and the insanity involved here defy analysis. My dark side wonders about the human psychology underlying the anti-pit bull hysteria coupled with breed specific legislation.

Might the lowly pit bull be a permissible scapegoat for something else?

I've spent enough time on this that I might as well upload pictures of the "suspects":

Yeah, yeah. Presumption of innocence and all that.

(But at least we know the pit bull is guilty! Reassuring, isn't it?)

UPDATE: My speculation about possible unconscious motivations was neither original, nor (it seems) unfounded. Not according to CHAKO Dog Blog:

Donald Butler, a member of the Public Safety Committee for Horicon, Wisconsin, believes that Horicon should ban Pit Bulls. His rationale for wanting Pit Bulls out of Horicon is simple, if shockingly discriminatory.

"Horicon is not a ghetto. This is one breed of dogs we do not need."

Many educated dog advocates, attorneys, and scholars have stated that breed discrimination is often a guise for classism. Never before, however, has a public official come right out and admitted such a thing!

We applaud Donald Butler for his bravery. It takes guts to admit that the sole motivation for wanting to get rid of Pit Bulls is because one believes that only "ghetto" people own Pit Bulls. Is it possible that Mr. Butler believes that, by banning Pit Bulls, all the people with darker skin will leave Horicon with their beloved Pit Bulls?

Mr. Butler, despite his bravery, made quite the ass of himself for such assumptions. Even if true, he has shown himself to be a racist, pure and simple. However, Mr. Butler's belief that Pit Bulls are "ghetto" is, of course, erroneous. People like Helen Keller, Michael J. Fox, and John Stewart own Pit Bulls.

MORE: In my quest to be fair to both "sides," I should point out that Slate's Clara Jeffery has examined whether pit bulls themselves can be racist. Apparently so! And amazingly enough, so can other breeds.

Believe it or not, such things depend on training!

AND MORE: The pit bull racist symbology is older than I thought. From the New York Times, 1991:

At the core of the book is a strangely baroque dog story. Bandit, Ms. Hearne writes, "belonged to an old man in Stamford, Connecticut, an old black man, Mr. Lamon Redd." On July 9, 1987, Mr. Redd's tenant and next-door neighbor, "one Mr. Johnson," quarreled with his girlfriend. She went home to her mother, Effie Powell, who in turn came over to Mr. Redd's yard and clobbered Mr. Johnson with a broom, an attack "which Mr. Johnson seems to have deserved," Ms. Hearne asserts. "Bandit brought the assault on his friend to a screeching halt, with his teeth." For six weeks or so, he "did time in the pound." And when he came home he was "in a sorry state." He "wet on the porch, was whupped, and bit Mr. Redd. At this point a neighbor called the police, Bandit was seized again, and a disposal order was issued."

This is where Ms. Hearne enters the story. When Mr. Redd appeals the disposal order (he blames himself for Bandit's second attack, since the dog warned him repeatedly before biting), his lawyer calls Ms. Hearne as an expert witness. At the time, no one -- not Mr. Redd, not his lawyer, not the state's chief canine control officer and not Bandit -- knew what they were in for. Ms. Hearne's legal mission is to save Bandit's life. And this she does. But her mission as an unrepentant trainer of both dogs and people is far bigger. That is why "Bandit" is not only a dog story but also a deeply eccentric lesson in justice, linguistics, racism and teleology.

It is hard to tell at any given moment where Ms. Hearne's argument, or even one of her sentences, is going. Nonetheless you feel you are being led by her playful pedantry to a place where you will be shown to be wanting.

Ms. Hearne has a lesson for everyone. For the judge who handed down the disposal order, she has a linguistics lesson: "I do not think you can execute someone who does not know what an execution is." For those who testified in court against Bandit -- claiming that "pit bulls" like him have "vicious genes" and "the Jekyll-Hyde syndrome" -- she has a lesson about bigotry. "The pit bull 'hysteria,' " she writes, "is one of the cleverest pieces of racist propaganda." Today, people are invited "to make the leap from socially unacceptable inner city males to pit bulls." That much was clear, she writes, when Mr. Redd tried to defend his dog by saying "the white ladies like him, too."

My often narrow focus on matters of logic makes me miss things like racial symbology. I hate to think it was staring me in the face for so long.

Sometimes, logic can be a shortcoming I guess.

UPDATE: I forgot to link to the famous "FIND THE PIT BULL" test. There's only one pit bull there, and even I had trouble spotting it. But that doesn't matter to today's dog grabbers.

UPDATE: In breaking news story linked by Drudge, 68 pit bulls were found living in a dilapidated house -- with children:

WICHITA, Kan. -- Two Kansas children are in protective custody after authorities found 68 pit bulls living in their home.

Police said the children -- an 11-year-old boy and a 5-year-old girl -- were found living in deplorable conditions.

The dogs were living inside and in the back yard. Many of the dogs have scars and were probably used for fighting, authorities said.

The children's father was arrested on various charges, including resisting arrest and child endangerment.

And the breed is at fault?

But of course!

(Will someone please tell me whose culture war Coco and I are supposed to be fighting?)

This looks like domestic terrorism to me:

SEATTLE – One person is dead and five others have been injured in a shooting at the Jewish Federation at 2031 Third Ave. in downtown Seattle. One suspect has been taken into custody.

Seattle police spokesman Rich Pruitt said police are confident that only one shooter was involved.

Sources told KING 5 the suspect is a 31-year-old Pakistani man with a criminal background. He is from the Pasco but his citizenship status or how long he has lived in the United States is unknown. Also unknown is what sort of criminal record he has. Officials are on the way to the Pasco to interview his family.

According to the Seattle Times, a man got through security at the Jewish Federation and told staff members, "I'm a Muslim American; I'm angry at Israel," then began shooting, according to Amy Wasser-Simpson, the vice president for planning and community services for the Jewish Federation.

FBI spokesman David Gomez said officials believe the suspect acted alone and is not affiliated with a foreign organization.

There will probably be a strained effort to say this was not terrorism because it was a lone individual. Well, Timothy McVeigh was a lone individual.

I live in a neighborhood that's about 50% Jewish, in which there is a Saudi madrassa. It worries a lot of people that someone from the madrassa might just lose it and flip out like this one of these days.

This reminds me of my post on Wednesday about eliminationist rhetoric. Here's a guy who put his into practice.

If only there were some way to require that immigrants to this country learn American civics and assimilate. I have no idea whether the gunman was a citizen, but if he was, I wonder whether he really believed in this country, or considered it an enemy to be defeated along with "the Jews." If he thought these people were Jews and not Americans, if he thought he was a Muslim and not an American, he had no business calling himself an American.

I'm sorry, but "Why do they hate us?" is not a question which we should have to ask of Americans -- or for that matter, people on the American street.

UPDATE (07/29/06): Via Glenn Reynolds, I see that there's quite a hurry to declare that the shooter suffered from "mental illness." Not that this would make him any less a terrorist than any other nutcase who believes in shooting Jews in the name of God, but aren't such issues normally raised by defense lawyers?

Jeff Goldstein is one of the funniest people in the blogosphere, and the continued psychotic threats against his child have not only gone way too far, the whole thing makes me wonder what the goal is. To stop Jeff from being funny? To make him quit blogging? To make him turn off comments? Or to make "the blogosphere" (as if a psychotic troll were representative) look bad? Or all four?

Regardless of the reasons, going after someone's kid is just so low.

It's still hard to believe that a trained professional would act this way, but it appears to be the same person as last time. Patterico has more.

Words fail me.

Anyone who feels the same way that I do should go here and hit Jeff's tip jar (as I did) to help him pay for the legal expenses he'll likely incur having to defend and protect his child. It's unbelievable that any blogger should ever have to go through something like this.

I wish Jeff the best of luck.

An end to sock puppetry? By all means.

Via Glenn Greenwald Reynolds, who doesn't make clear which "side" he's on.

Why?

This "Glenn" confusion is starting to bother me. Has anyone (outside of Brazil, that is) ever actually seen Glenn Greenwald? I mean, in person? Sure, there's been a talking image floating around on the Telescreen, but how can we be sure that there really is a Glenn Greenwald, much less that the talking image actually depicts a human being of that name?

Sorry, but I'm skeptical.

There are just way too many "coincidences."

UPDATE: A rare admission from the Glenn behind the strings.

Also via Glenn Reynolds, Don Surber shows that Greenwald is wrong about a number of things, while spinning the sock puppetry to make him look like the victim of personal attacks.

Food for thought.

But what about the cute lyrics?

In his latest Weekly Check on the Bias, Jeff Soyer discusses the current crime wave in Philadelphia and asks whether lenient judges are to blame:

More anti-gun laws don't stop crime. Locking up thugs for a good long time does. The City of Brotherly Love is experiencing a surge in gun violence. There's been an interesting set of letters appearing in the Philadelphia Daily News over the past few weeks. It started with one by Joseph Fox, Chief of Detectives of the Philadelphia Police Department here:

More than 70 percent of Philly's murder victims have criminal records, many of them extensive. In excess of 80 percent of those arrested for murder have criminal records, many of them for violent crime.

The number of people who are engaged in violent criminal activity is minuscule as a percentage of the overall population. Common sense dictates that if this limited number of violent criminals are locked away, the bloodshed would begin to abate.

Our judges have the power to do this.

Prison overcrowding:

PHILADELPHIA -- As many as 25 to 30 men have been kept for days in a holding cell with a single toilet and no beds as detainees overwhelm Philadelphia's prison system, a lawsuit filed yesterday charged.

The suit comes just five years after state and federal courts ended 30 years of supervision prompted by earlier lawsuits over prison conditions.

The city -- whose prison population has more than doubled since 1987 to about 8,800 -- reopened a long-shuttered prison over the weekend to make room for the newest detainees.

Holmesburg Prison, which was closed a decade ago, is being used temporarily to hold prisoners during the intake process. Pretrial detainees have recently been held for days in police districts and the police administration building, sometimes without beds or access to lawyers or medical care, the lawsuit charged. Police holding cells are designed to hold people for just a few hours.

"It's intolerable to treat people that way, and there's something called the Constitution which says that you can't," said civil-rights lawyer David Rudovsky, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who filed yesterday's suit as well as an earlier suit in 1971.

City Solicitor Romulo L. Diaz Jr. said the city has been aware of the problem, and working on it with judges, prosecutors and others, for more than a year. He expects that more money will be needed to hire staff and equipment and come up with alternative solutions, such as home-monitoring devices for low-level offenders.

The city currently spends $262 million a year on its prison system, up from $93 million in 1987 and $195 million in 2001.

Rudofsky, btw, is a member of the Penn law school faculty, a prominent prison rights attorney, and former local counsel for the famed Mumia Abu Jamal, so he knows his turf. While I am leery of activists whose ultimate goal is to close all prisons, it strikes me that if prison conditions are so unconstitutional that inmates have to be released early, something is very, very wrong.

Professor Rudofsky mentions the war on drugs:

"With the war on drugs, you have an inexhaustible supply of possible prisoners, limited only by the number of police you have," Rudovsky said.

Alternatives to incarceration should be considered for people charged with minor crimes and those nearing parole, he said.

Riley's 20-year-old son died after a .22-caliber bullet went through his forehead and lodged in his brain. A neighbor, Anthony Byrd, confessed.

Byrd, also 20, told police that he had bought the gun "off someone in the street." What street, from whom and for how much, he didn't say.

Byrd called the shooting an accident, which is curious since he ran from the crime scene and waited a week to surrender.

"I was confused," he told investigators. As for the gun? "I don't really remember what happened to it."

Byrd admitted his guilt, and let the lawyers decide whether to call it murder or manslaughter. A few weeks ago, he was sentenced to 111/2 to 24 months behind bars, with credit for time served since his arrest last fall.

With the Philadelphia prison system so overcrowded the city is being sued, the odds are that Byrd will be free sooner rather than later.

Get a gun, take a life, and get yours back that fast? If it's that easy, no wonder everyone's doing it.

Conservatives and many Second Amendment supporting libertarians (like myself) often argue that the solution is locking up people who commit crimes with guns, but if they cannot be locked up, doesn't that tend to reduce the lock-em-up argument to a form of mere debate rhetoric?

The fact is, violent criminals with long records are not being locked up. They can get guns illegally in numerous ways, and making guns harder for law abiding people to get only decreases the number of armed law abiding citizens. Considering the dysfunctional nature of the lock-em-up system, armed law-abiding citizens -- like this store owner, and this armed citizen -- are one of society's few last lines of defense.

I think this is another example of how the drug war is ruining the criminal justice system.

By artificially driving up the price of substances of little inherent worth, these laws create opportunities for instant wealth, torture traditional notions of crime and jurisprudence, manufacture false morality while criminalizing human suffering, and provide a gigantic, artificial playing field for opportunistic crime which otherwise would not be there.

The result is that ordinary police work is corrupted, and we see police overreacting to things like cell phone photography, as well as the use of deadly SWAT teams in routine law enforcement.

If drugs were legal, the streets would be safer, there'd be room in the prisons, and while addicts would continue to be victims, they'd no longer be punished for being victims, and they wouldn't have to prey on the rest of us.

Who knows? Some of them might be motivated to get help.

MORE: I forgot to mention that Jeff is taking a break from his weekly report on the bias. I hope it's only temporary, as I think Jeff is providing a real service to the Second Amendment.

Thanks to an email from blogger and commenter James Rummel, I discovered (only after about a half an hour of trial and error experimentation) that MT Blacklist would not allow any comment which used the word "Socialism."

OK, I hate socialism, and I freely admit my bias. But never in my wildest dreams would I even think of banning the word, and I couldn't imagine what would possess my anti-spam software to do that either. It's not as if I've been getting spam from Trotskyites, or anything that would trigger automatic deletions of such words. Besides, James Rummel was making a point not about ordinary socialism, but "National Socialism." Even that wasn't allowed.

The words "socialist" and "socialism" simply would not go through -- either alone or in combination with other words. But "social" went through.

Finally, I saw the problem.

"Socialism" contains a very-banned, very-offensive word:

CIALIS

I deleted that from MT-Blacklist's banned words, and now anyone can comment about socialists, or socialism.

Googling around, I discovered that I am not alone.

Here's The Liberal Avenger, in a post titled "SoCIALISm":

Who knew?

The disappearing comments were due to the popular drug name CIALIS playing an integral role in every soCIALISt here.

In light of this I wonder what the reasoning was behind Lilly Pharmaceuticals’ decision to call their drug CIALIS.

Labor Day celebrations frequented by workers with raging hard-ons?

Workers of the World - frolic around my May Pole.

[Update: OK - lame joke. Who can write the best May Pole joke now?]

(I bet old Fidel could use a dose of the former while he awaits the latter . . . Stiff either way, coming or going!)

I'm confused again.

Ed Cone (via Glenn Reynolds) linked to the official website of the Randi Rhodes Show, which yesterday had a comment about Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, directly followed by a comment about the Israel/Hezbollah war:

Bush puppet/Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki spouts White House talking points sprinkled with Islam to a joint session of Congress.

Kofi Annan: UN observers were deliberately attacked and killed by Israel. WTF?!

I'm glad I'm not a war blogger, but sometimes I feel guilty about neglecting my war coverage. I just don't have access to inside information of the sort which might enable me to comment even in a semi-coherent manner about battlefield decisions, troop movements, enemy strength, etc. (Of course if I did, I probably wouldn't comment at all, so there's a bit of a paradox in all this.)

But I can certainly make a stab at trying to make sense out of someone else's analysis. Or (as in this case) not.

I'll start with al-Maliki's "White House talking points." I'm assuming that the Randi Rhodes analyst is on the left, and that he or she therefore must have taken into account not only Prime Minister al-Maliki's actual remarks, but the widely-reported left-wing criticism of them:

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) -- Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean on Wednesday called Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki an "anti-Semite" for failing to denounce Hezbollah for its attacks against Israel.

Al-Maliki has condemned Israel's offensive, prompting several Democrats to boycott his address to a joint meeting of Congress and others to criticize him. Dean's comments were the strongest to date.

"The Iraqi prime minister is an anti-Semite," the Democratic leader told a gathering of business leaders in Florida. "We don't need to spend $200 and $300 and $500 billion bringing democracy to Iraq to turn it over to people who believe that Israel doesn't have a right to defend itself and who refuse to condemn Hezbollah."

So I am still confused. Unless Howard Dean is covertly suggesting that anti-Semitism is a White House talking point, something does not make sense.

Fortunately, my job does not require me to make sense of the Randi Rhodes Show, or its analysts.

As to the assertion by Kofi Annan that "UN observers were deliberately attacked and killed by Israel," Belmont Club's Wretchard has devoted an extensive analysis to that, and it's pretty clear that the troop positions of UNIFIL (the UN group) and Hezbollah are very close together, and that Israel has had a very tough time avoiding accidentally hitting UNIFIL. Wretchard also quotes from this statement from a CBC radio interview with a Canadian general (which can be streamed at LGF):

We received emails from him a few days ago, and he was describing the fact that he was taking fire within, in one case, three meters of his position for tactical necessity, not being targeted. Now that’s veiled speech in the military. What he was telling us was Hezbollah soldiers were all over his position and the IDF were targeting them. And that’s a favorite trick by people who don’t have representation in the UN. They use the UN as shields knowing that they can’t be punished for it.

The U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, or UNIFIL, was created and dispatched to that country after terrorists from Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization entered Israel and hijacked a bus and Israel responded. Thirty-six hostages died. Israel's response was to enter south Lebanon to destroy the terrorist base camps.

The U.N.'s response was to adopt Resolution 425, which, naturally, called for Israel to withdraw "immediately" and set up UNIFIL for the expressed purpose of "assisting the government of Lebanon in ensuring the return of effective authority to the area." It did such a good job of preventing the PLO from using south Lebanon to attack Israel that in June 1982, Israel felt compelled to launch a full-scale invasion to oust the PLO once and for all.

UNIFIL was there from the 1982 assassination of Lebanese President Bashir Gemayel through the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, both with the involvement of a Syrian government to whom the idea of a strong and truly independent Lebanon was anathema.

UNIFIL was there when Hezbollah, with full Syrian and Iranian complicity, rushed in to fill the political vacuum left by the PLO. When the Israelis withdrew totally from every square inch of Lebanon in 2000, UNIFIL stood by as Hezbollah established its "effective authority" over south Lebanon.

UNIFIL never has done much real peacekeeping; the U.N. reacts only if Israel attempts to defend itself. As former Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Dore Gold notes: "Hezbollah would launch military attacks 50 meters from a U.N. outpost, Israel would shoot back and UNIFIL would protest against the Israeli response."

I'm shocked.

Shocked!

Give peace a chance?

Anyone naive enough to imagine that Nasrallah and Hezbollah want peace -- or have ever wanted peace -- should watch this video.

Yeah, this war-blogging, Rhodes-analyst stuff is a real drag.

But what's the alternative?

Peace blogging?

MORE: The Jerusalem Post points out that Israel indignantly denies targeting UNAFIL deliberately, and demands an investigation of UNAFIL's apparent inseparability from Hezbollah:

Such an investigation must determine more than just how UNIFIL troops were located in such close proximity to Hizbullah terrorists that they ended up in the line of fire. More fundamentally, it would delve into how, in complete contravention of its objectives, UNIFIL stood by without a murmur as a terrorist organization amassed thousands upon thousands of rockets whose unprovoked use has killed and wounded dozens of Israelis and precipitated the current war.

The bitter irony is that Annan himself reported to the Security Council back in January 2001 that UNIFIL had completed implementation of the part of its mandate requiring it to help Lebanese authorities resume control of the area vacated by Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000. If he was right, the IDF would not now be operating against Hizbullah, and absorbing mounting casualties. And four UNIFIL workers would not be dead today.

Giving peace a chance!

UPDATE: Via Glenn Reynolds, Captain Ed has an interesting post titled "The Nasrallah Blues." The Israelis have penetrated the sheikh's communications network, and he's being forced to acknowledge the serious shortcomings of his leadership. Says Ed:

Having a commander communicate an apology of this sort indicates a growing dissatisfaction with leadership in the ranks. Nasrallah so far has done nothing to convince anyone that he has a grasp of either strategy or tactics. He has proven that he has no understanding of his enemy, nor much of his putative allies in the region, almost all of whom have declined to rush to his side in this fight.

If Nasrallah survives, I suspect he'll try to claim an Arafat-style "victory." And if this is then spun as a "victory" for peace, who knows? Might there even be a Nobel "Peace" Prize in his future?

UPDATE: THANK YOU GLENN REYNOLDS for linking this post, and welcome all!

I almost forgot that today is the 26 of July -- an important Communist holiday in Cuba which commemorates Castro's 1953 assault on the Moncada barracks in Santiago.

They celebrated by (among other things) blasting Bush:

(AP) Fidel Castro led tens of thousands of Communist Party faithful in celebrating Cuba's Revolution Day on Wednesday, telling a large crowd that his revolution's social achievements exceed anything a U.S.-backed replacement could accomplish.

Returning to his roots in eastern Cuba, Castro also praised Granma province, named for the yacht that carried him back to Cuba in 1956 to launch the battles that led him to triumph three years later.

"Granma (province) doesn't need any Yankee transition plan to vaccinate and teach our people to read and write," Castro said, drawing loud applause from the crowd in this provincial capital. "They should tell Mr. Bush ... to come to Granma to see a development plan."

What shouldn't be overlooked in any thorough report of this year's Rebellion Day festivities was a very special event held in Alta Gracia, Argentina just over the weekend -- in which Castro and his protege Hugo Chavez visited the boyhood home of Che Guevara:

ALTA GRACIA, Argentina— Fidel and Hugo went on a pilgrimage yesterday to Che’s house.

In an emotional journey, Cuban President Fidel Castro and Venezuelan ally Hugo Chavez toured the Argentine boyhood home of Castro’s fallen comrade and legendary guerrilla, Ernesto “Che” Guevara. It was a first visit for both.

“Fidel! Fidel!” and “Hugo! Hugo!” the crowd of 2,000 chanted as the 79-year-old Castro, wearing his trademark green military fatigues, got out of his limousine. Chavez was right by Castro’s side as they entered the house amid a crush of security agents.

While Castro made no public comment, he smiled broadly and shook hands with supporters in the crowd. Chavez told reporters the two were delighted by their tour: “Fidel invited me to come and get to know the house. For me, it’s a real honor being here.”

“We feel it! We feel it! Guevara is right with us!” the crowd shouted yesterday. .

Castro first visited Argentina in 1959 after the Cuban revolution and returned to attend a regional summit Friday that inducted Venezuela into the Mercosur trade bloc.

Guevara spent most of his childhood in central Argentina, where his family hoped a mild climate would ease his severe asthma. Guevara’s family later moved to Buenos Aires, where he enrolled in medical school before launching the famous motorcycle trip around South America that inspired him to give up medicine for leftist revolution.

Here's the pair, posing with the little bronze Che:

And here's the entourage posing in front of the famous Korda "T-shirt" photograph that's so in with those who care -- who really care -- about "social justice":

And last but not least, a group hug!

Awwww.....

Where it came to "eliminationist rhetoric," Guevara did more than just talk the talk.

He practiced what he preached.

I'd like to examine what I consider to be a textbook example of genuine eliminationist rhetoric. (As opposed to the highly questionable variety discussed by Rick Moran.)

I found the above picture at a post by Tammy Bruce titled "Hezbollah Among Us."

Calls for destruction of Israel and the Jews are nothing new, and had the same picture had been taken in any number of places in the Mideast, it wouldn't be all that newsworthy.

But -- it was taken at a demonstration in New York.

In this country, advocacy of genocide is normally thought of as a right wing phenomenon. Had the above people been wearing Nazi uniforms, they'd have almost certainly been greeted by huge and angry counterdemonstrations, like those which greeted the uniformed Nazis here. As it happens, I consider advocates of genocide against Jews to be on the right, but it really doesn't matter whether they're considered on the left or the right. They are engaged, quite literally, in eliminationist rhetoric.

So why is it that this literal eliminationist rhetoric -- advocacy, right here in the United States, of genocide against the Jews -- would not be called eliminationist rhetoric by the people who routinely use the term against the likes of Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh? (Or would it? Please enlighten me if my suspicions are wrong.)

Is it because "eliminationist rhetoric" is some sort of leftist code language? Frankly, I think it would be more likely that Tammy Bruce would be accused of using "ER" simply for suggesting that the genocide advocates be deported:

This is one example where everyone at this rally carrying signs calling for Israel's destruction and are sympathetic to Hezbollah should be considered supporters of the enemy, arrested and interrogated. And then, of course, either jailed or deported. And if they have somehow managed to become citizens of the United States, they should be stripped of that honor and then deported back to the pit from whence they came.

I think there would be. Even though we're no longer at war with Germany, but we are at war with international terrorists.

Or am I missing something?

MORE: My confusion may touch on the definition of "genocide." As Glenn Reynolds observes, all genocide is not equal:

... in lefty newspeak, "genocide" is a code word meaning "self-defense" . . .

Well, yes. There was a film with precisely that theme.

(Um, wouldn't that be "oldspeak" then?)

UPDATE: My "extremest" thanks to Glenn Reynolds for linking this post!

Welcome all.

UPDATE: Via Glenn Reynolds, here's Austin Bay on fascism:

Fascists organizations often have an imperial restorationist rhetorical pitch and political platform. Mussolini certainly did and Bin Laden does.

Get ready for some moral relativism, because that's exactly what's coming.

During the discussion of sock puppetry (in the most recent post about Doug Thompson and CHB), commenter Kip Watson asked about the origin of the term:

Did you just coin the term 'sock puppets' for this sort of dishonesty?

(I hadn't heard it before)

If so, nice one! Knowing the devils name is how you drive it out!

Posted by Kip Watson at July 25, 2006 08:06 PM

No; I didn't first use the term -- not even to describe CHB (the credit for that goes to John Hawkins).

As to the online use of the term, according to Wikipedia its use goes back to the 1990s:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_sock_puppet

The term was perhaps first used on July 9, 1993 in a posting to bit.listserv.fnord-l, but was not in common usage in USENET groups until 1996.

(Links added to my comment.)

Now I'm thinking, did I make a mistake? Or are there different categories of sock puppets?

As the Wikipedia entry notes, sock puppetry is frowned on:

Sockpuppet (sometimes known also as a mule, or a glove puppet) is an additional account created by an existing member of an Internet community pretending to be a separate person. This is done so as to manufacture the illusion of support in a vote or argument or to act without social effect on one's "main" account stay away from the issue. This behaviour is often seen as dishonest by online communities and as a result these individuals are often labeled as trolls.

I have lower standards than most people, and while I post and comment under my own name, I have no problem with anonymous or pseudonymous posting or commenting. True, when push comes to shove, opinions from anonymous people are not taken as seriously as opinions from identified people, but that's just common sense, as well as collective blogospheric wisdom.

I do see a distinction between sock puppetry and genuine, fullscale fraud, and via Glenn Reynolds, I see that I am not alone. Allah ranks the various "scandals," and rates the Greenwald sock puppetry at the bottom -- below even the Hiltzik affair.

When he appeared on CNN's "Reliable Sources," Glenn Reynolds (hmmm... these days, I guess we need to be careful not to say "Glenn" without the last name, don't we?) didn't seem to think the Hiltzik sock puppetry was all that big a deal. I don't either. I think the only reason Allah ranks it above the Greenwald affair is because Hiltzik was an MSM journalist, and Greenwald is a blogger.

Because they're online where consequences are few and anyone can do pretty much anything, bloggers enjoy an inherent right to anonymity (including the right at their own risk to engage in sock puppetry) which isn't shared by mainstream journalists. They post often, and at all hours of the day and night, and it gets crazy sometimes. Bloggers always have the option of waking up in the morning, saying, "I said that?" and going back and retracting it, correcting it, modifying it. Unlike Hiltzik, there are no major consequences, and they won't lose their jobs. However, it goes without saying that absent some acceptable explanation for the behavior, bloggers face a loss of credibility for sock puppetry.

(Again, there is a difference between "honest" and "dishonest" sock puppetry; pretending to be "Karl Rove" is honest; perhaps it's not even sock puppetry.)

I don't especially like sock puppetry, but in blogging, it just goes with the turf. Many of my commenters are anonymous, and I don't mind. Some of them are pretending to be other than what they are, and sometimes I've seen obviously the same commenter return under a different name. If I learned who it was, and proclaimed that to the world, would that be a scandal? Not at all -- probably not even if I could establish it was Glenn Greenwald. However, if I could establish it was Dan Rather, that would be something else. (On the other hand, if "Glenn Greenwald" or "Dan Rather" left ridiculous comments, I'd instantly know these were honest, "friendly," sock puppets.)

My point is that mere sock puppetry in the blogosphere is not that big of a deal. This is why I am having second thoughts about calling CHB and Doug Thompson "sock puppets." (My chart may be more like it.) Not only is Capitol Hill Blue calling itself a news site, Google includes it as a news site. This is despite the fact that for years the site relied on a fictious "expert" named "George Harleigh" -- a professor of Political Science said to have worked for Nixon and Reagan, whose identity I questioned, and who, within a day of my InstaLanched post, was scrubbed from the site and admitted not to exist. (The fact that CHB tried to make this look retroactive raised many suspicions, and in comments it was pointed out that the "story" had been predated.)

Whether it's a mini-scandal or a big scandal, I don't know. (That depends on whether the term "Google News" is to be taken seriously, I guess.)

I soon noticed a 2003 mini-scandal involving this same site and another fictitious person -- one Terrance Wilkinson, said to have worked for the CIA and whose fake allegations managed to make their way onto CNN before he was unmasked.

Both times, CHB replied that it had been "had." I'm very skeptical about this claim, and I am particularly skeptical about the repeated disappearance and reappearance of Doug Thompson, and the way his multiple editors appear and disappear.

Most recently, I noticed that a "Dr. Stephanie Crossfield" (said to be a psychologist who treats patients for lying and prevarication) said exactly the same things about George Bush that she said about Bill Clinton.

Here's what CHB reported her saying about Clinton in 1999:

"The President exhibited all the classic symptoms of pathological prevarication," said Dr. Stephanie Crossfield, a psychologist who treats people who have trouble telling the truth. "His eye movements, gestures, and changes in voice tone all point to a consistent evasion of the truth."

"President Bush exhibited symptoms of pathological prevarication," says Dr. Stephanie Crossfield, a psychologist who treats people who have trouble telling the truth and who watched Bush's performances on Monday and Tuesday at my request. "His eye movements, gestures, and changes in voice tone all display traits of consistent evasion of the truth."

"Article removed from our database"

"Because of sourcing problems we have removed this article from our database. We also learned that at least one passage was lifted by a researcher from another news source without attribution. Our apologies...."

This is unbelievable in the extreme. Every time I catch this guy, he simply pulls the articles!

What more can I say? Other than, here's the Google Cache. Again.

I have lost count of the number of times I have had to resort to Google caches with "Capitol Hill Blue." This is the second time with the same "article." On Sunday (July 23, 2006), language was inserted crediting the San Francisco Chronicle after I pointed out plagiarism.

In three years of blogging, I've never seen anything like this, and I hope I never do again. Considering that it comes from a long-established news site, I think it's massive, ongoing fraud, and I am sorry I called it mere "sock puppetry." Had I not asked questions, that March article would still be sitting there. So would the numerous articles quoting "George Harleigh."

Back to "Dr. Stephanie Crossfield." When "George Harleigh" was exposed here, a "Bill McTavish" (claiming to be the editor, but whose identity I also suspect is fictitious) blamed a previous "editor" named "Jack Sharp" (equally unverifiable).

Who is to be blamed now?

Bear in mind that "Dr. Stephanie Crossfield" is said (by Doug Thompson) to have been "hired" by CHB to "diagnose" President Clinton by watching a video. None of the links still go to CHB, but this archive site and Free Republic both preserve the original text, which reads as follows:

President Bill Clinton lied repeatedly during his Friday press conference, avoiding the truth when discussing the China spying scandal, his relationship with his wife and charges that he raped Juanita Broaddrick, an analysis by two experts shows.

Capitol Hill Blue hired a psychologist who treats chronic liars and a private investigator who uses voice stress analysis to catch liars. They analyzed the President's press conference live on television and again on videotape.

Their conclusion: The President lied more often than he told the truth. Even when he told the nation that he felt a "scorecard" would show he had been a good President who had told the truth more often than he had lied, he was, in fact, lying.

"The President exhibited all the classic symptoms of pathological prevarication," said Dr. Stephanie Crossfield, a psychologist who treats people who have trouble telling the truth. "His eye movements, gestures, and changes in voice tone all point to a consistent evasion of the truth."

Jonathan Rensley, a private investigator who used a voice stress analyzer to monitor the President's performance during the press conference, agrees.

"In spite of his demeanor, the President's voice patterns showed unusually high levels of stress, consistent with someone who is not telling the truth," Rensley said.

At Capitol Hill Blue's insistence, Dr. Crossfield and Rensley did not make their judgement based on one viewing of the President's performance or by consulting with each other. Both watched the press conference live, then rechecked their findings by viewing a full videotape of the press conference on both Saturday and Sunday to confirm their findings.

Dr. Crossfield where are you?

Can anyone help? I mean, isn't there a registry of psychologists anywhere? And if it turns out (as I'm 99.99% certain it will) that Dr. Crossfield doesn't exist -- and hasn't existed -- for the past seven years she's been quoted as an expert, who will be blamed? Thompson, McTavish, Sharp, Hampton, or Riley?

I'll say this in defense of the blogosphere's sock puppets. At least they aren't quoted as expert sources in news stories like "George Harleigh" and "Dr. Stephanie Crossfield." They weren't relied on for years by people on the right as well as the left.

And at least the blogosphere's sock puppets don't disappear when they're discovered. Nor are they blamed on other sock puppets. They remain part of the blogosphere's shared collective heritage.

Frankly, I hope "Dr. Stephanie Crossfield" does exist.

(Since she's an expert on the subject of deception, I'm sure she wouldn't mind sharing her views on sock puppetry. . .)

AFTERTHOUGHT: Considering that I had to go back and add "Reynolds" to the name "Glenn" above, I'm wondering about something. Can't the "Glenn" in "Glenn Greenwald" be changed or dropped to avoid further confusion? I know the Greenwald sock puppetry isn't a big deal, but it does reveal that his identity might not be all that important to him, so maybe just as a slap on the wrist he could just lose or change the first name (or have it lost or changed).

Or am I being too harsh?

MORE: As I've said before, exposing phony news sites is not my shtick, but I just stumbled onto this because the name "George Harleigh" did not ring true. People have said that because Capitol Hill Blue is not taken seriously, "exposing" anything there is a waste of time. Well, if CHB isn't taken seriously, then why is it listed as a Google News site when many other deserving sites are not? CHB, it should be remembered, lays claim to being "better" than the blogosphere:

Howard Kurtz, media writer for The Washington Post, once described the Internet as the place where “anybody with a modem and a mouth can be a publisher.” Blogs drive Kurtz’s point home. Even his newspaper has blogs written by reporters as well as freelancers hired to produce even more blogs written from a partisan point of view.

Which is my problem with blogs. Most, especially political blogs, exist solely to advance a narrow-focus point of view, an openly partisan agenda. The blog generating the most buzz these days is DailyKos, a “community blog” operated by a couple of Democratic activists who, among other things, use their blog to attract clients to one partner’s consulting business and then provide a quid-pro-quo of endorsements by Kos to those who pony up fat consulting fees.

Kos caters to “progressives,” the current buzzword for “liberal.” Somebody apparently focus-grouped the word “liberal” and found it has a bad rep so they came up a new name that means exactly the same thing.

“Progressives” have their litany of followers, usually mom-and-pop bloggers who churn out sermons to the party faithful and decry anything that smacks of right-wing, conservative or Republican.

The right-wingers, of course, have their blogs to counter anything posted by the left and this all leads to a shrill war of words that splatter all over the Internet as verbal diarrhea.

I might be wrong about Kos, but since Thompson is using him as the example of all that's wrong with the blogosphere, I have to say that I don't remember seeing that kind of invective there (or at Atrios for that matter). Both are about as partisanly anti-Bush as it's possible to be.

Nonetheless, Thompson goes on to complain that "he" can't integrate "us":

In my three, aborted attempts to integrate the “blogosphere” into Capitol Hill Blue I found that those who want to read blogs and respond to articles posted thereon have no desire to participate in civil non-partisan discussions. Posts quickly turned into partisan diatribes with each side bashing the other.

Never!

I think CHB is beneath the dignity of our sock puppets!

UPDATE (07/27/06): The CHB post-pulling festival continues. A commenter emailed me about my previous post about "George Harleigh"

Your link to CHB on Bush killing kittens seems to be gone. The page is there, but whatever was on the page is gone.

http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_7779.shtml

Dr. Justin Frank, a prominent George Washington University psychiatrist and author of the book, Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President, says Bush has a cruel, sadistic streak that goes back to his childhood when a young George gleefully bragged about dissecting cats, cutting them open while they were still alive.

The boy who tortured cats, Dr. Frank says, grew up into an alcohol-abusing bully who strikes out at anyone who opposes him.
All one has to do, Dr. Frank says, is confront the President and the bully emerges.

"To actually directly confront him in a clear way, to bring him out, so you would really see the bully, and you would also see the fear," he says.

AND AN AFTERTHOUGHT: It occurs to me that this is getting extremely redundant. The news stories keep getting pulled, "experts" keep disappearing, and various "editors" are blamed in a game of musical chairs.

I'm not in charge of the Internet, so beyond this, there's little I can do. CHB will doubtless carry on as long as there's someone there to keep it going.

The First Amendment right to free speech carries no requirement or guarantee of honesty.

Sorry for the long post which is about to follow, but the time has come for me to return to the roots of my various political (doubtless infantile) disorders.

A better choice for the title of this post might be "Poli Psy 101" . . . (Ironically, by writing this post, I'm neglecting my search for one of the country's leading political psychologists -- Capitol Hill Blue's "Dr. Stephanie Crossfield"!)

The problem is, psychopolitical "disease" diagnoses are everywhere. A comment by Jon Thompson reminded me of an account I read recently about a doctoral student in psychology whose opinion that she was "not privileged" triggered a demand that she submit to psychological evaluation. She refused, and was expelled:

[Lorraine Land] started working on her doctorate in fall 2002 and had no major problems until October 2004, when she told psychology professor Cheryll Rothery-Jackson about an experience she had with clients of different socioeconomic backgrounds while doing a practicum at Friends Hospital in the Northeast.

"Really, what I said was not harmful," says Land, who has blond hair and wears a bubble-gum-pink outfit complete with a sparkly headband. "I acknowledged as a white woman, I'm sure I've had privileges; that doesn't mean I'm privileged. I'm not a Paris Hilton."

Rothery-Jackson, who is black, did not chastise Land for her remarks, but Land says, "From that point on, she went after me." (Rothery-Jackson did not respond to requests for comment.)

A few weeks later, Land received a letter from the psychology faculty saying she was argumentative, lacked insight and clinical experience and needed to control her tone. Then, the day before Thanksgiving, she received a review noting "serious concerns" in every aspect of her training. She submitted ways to improve, but the school was not satisfied.

During this time, Land says, Rothery-Jackson and another professor, Scott Browning, violated her trust by calling Friends Hospital to ask colleagues how she was progressing.

Finally, on Feb. 25, 2005, Browning told Land, who was already in therapy for anxiety, that she needed to undergo a psychological evaluation. Stress then led Land to request a break from her practicum. Friends Hospital agreed, but the college faculty never approved the change and failed Land in the course.

The school then dismissed her due to the failing grade and her reluctance to undergo an evaluation.