WYSIWYG blog editing … within the blog page
: Follow Me Here discovers a very cool-looking tool that allows you to edit your blog on the blog itself, in the plain old browser (just IE… take that, you Netscape liberals). The Blog “Adminimizer” is explained here. This is more than just a cool blog toy. This is about the wonders of XML: displaying and editing content in any form. We’ve had a drought of cool on the Internet lately. This is cool.
Wages of sin
: A topnotch Ken Layne column at FoxNews today on Saddam’s payments to suicide bombers‘ famlies.
Anthrax culprits
: It’s not every day that I say “amen” to a Wall Street Journal editorial, but I do today. They say that the administration’s domestic team is too quick to assume that the source of the anthrax murders is domestic. They point to the evidence I pointed to in recent days: an apparent anthrax lesion on one of the hijackers and the discovery of more biological warfare labs in Afghanistan.
…the FBI persists in asserting that the anthrax letter writer was probably a domestic nut with no ties to al Qaeda. Maybe so. But it’s also true that U.S. law-enforcement experts have been wrong about the sources of terror in the recent past, and are capable of becoming fixated on one theory of a case, which they then set out to prove. The first World Trade Center bombing, of course, turned out to be the culmination of a coordinated project carried out by a broad radical-Islamic network, not just a few disaffected crackpots living in the U.S.
The FBI, like the CIA and the other government intelligence-gathering agencies chasing terrorists, is a bureaucracy, and bureaucracies tend to operate under their own imperatives. In that context, it’s not reassuring that two senior law-enforcement officials involved in the anthrax investigation are quoted in yesterday’s Journal as saying that much of their work is aimed at ensuring that any evidence they bring forth will survive challenge in a courtroom. Well, we’d all like to arrest, convict and put away the individuals who dropped the anthrax letters in the mail, but the real national priority has to be forestalling more such attacks against the American people.
That means that we must be prepared to pursue the anthrax trail wherever it leads, even if it takes us to places, such as Iraq, that complicate choices about foreign policy for U.S. leadership.
Amen again. [via Instapundit]
Tragedy nuggets
: I get mail from James Archer reacting to my whining about the Oscars turning the Twin Towers into a politically incorrect image we shouldn’t see (below). He writes:
Why is it that every article, every news segment, every documentary, every essay, every song, every event, everything must mention “9-11!” every two minutes or be branded unamerican?
The events of that day have been transformed into a meme, a little postmodern nugget of political correctness that can be passed around like a pet rock, adored and petted and passed on to someone else. It’s no longer a historic event, it’s just an abstract concept. 9-11. Ground Zero. WTC. Firefighters. Flags. Giuliani. Images. Concepts.
Lit
: Will Warren at Unremitting Verse takes on Jonathan Franzen‘s hyper-hyped The Corrections.
