Dr. Sanity diagnoses a case of hysteria within the left blogosphere (It’s official, we are a police state…) over the FISA bill.

This histrionic post demonstrates exactly why it is impossible to engage members of the political and increasingly lunatic left in any sort of rational discussion about national security. It’s like trying to discuss responsibility with a self-indulgent and overly dramatic adolescent girl.

The angry teenager who just hates it when she doesn’t get her way, is particularly enraged when Mommy (usually on her side) goes along with Daddy; and we see that same dynamic rather frequently these days, as the narcissistic left raises the decibel level of their pouts and whines whenever their will is thwarted.

None of the rhetoric has anything remotely to do with reality; but all that is necessary for the left is to feel intensely that something is so, and for them it is.

We are living in a police state! Bush is Hitler! Christians are trying to impose a theocracy on America. We are being persecuted! Blah blah victims blah oppression blah fascist blah blah blah! And so on and so forth.

Which brings me to hysteria.

Hysteria is a concept characterized by a wide variety of physical and mental symptoms that result from dissociating one’s cognitive functioning from one’s emotion and/or behavior. The psychological defense that makes this happen is known as dissociation.

For the hysteric emotions are primary and are not subject to an objective reality.

Read the whole thing.

And the indignant leftwing blogger suggests that Dr. Sanity ought to be reported to the authorities.

New York Times:

Prominent liberal blogger Jerome Armstrong has agreed to pay nearly $30,000 in fines in a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission over allegations that Armstrong touted the stock of a software company on Raging Bull, an Internet bulletin board, in 2000, without disclosing that he was being paid to do so.

Armstrong, the co-author of “Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics,” with Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos, and the founder of the Democratic activist site MyDD.com, consented to a civil penalty of $20,000, plus disgorgement of $5,832, and $3,235 in interest.

SEC litigation release.

Senator Joseph Lieberman agrees with Never Yet Melted on the proposition that there is no possibility that US forces can be defeated by our adversaries on the ground in Iraq, and that if the war is lost, it will be lost in the domestic war for public opinion.

He said so on Bill Bennet’s radio program. And one of the Talking Points Memo crowd captured Senator Lieberman’s radio comment and packaged it as a YouTube 0:48 video for the left blogosphere to spit and hiss over today.

mcjoan at Daily Kos typically treats Lieberman’s observation as a gratuitous attack on Harry Reid, and (naturally) proceeds to play the left’s sad old tune about the sufferings of the American soldiers they are busily stabbing in the back.

The failed cloture vote dooming the deeply-flawed Immigration Bill was not necessarily, practically-speaking, a bad thing.

The bill represented an incoherent compromise between the political forces seeking to close the gap between reality and our currently unenforceable immigration laws, and the forces seeking to raise barriers and “secure the border.” I don’t think that bill effectively embodied any compelling logical solution, and it would have made partisans of neither side on the issue happy.

I think the country needs to think about all this some more, conduct a serious debate on the subject, and then craft a better solution. The Immigration Bill was an unholy mess, and I think we’re better off giving that one a miss, and trying again another year.

But the Senate vote obviously did manifest some discernible response to the groundswell of anti-immigration popular emotion successfully drummed up by certain segments of the political right. Our nativist law-and-order simpletons won one, and they ought to have been feeling good, but unhappily some members of the right blogosphere’s reaction to their own success at the far-from-difficult feat of evoking a little political cowardice on Capitol Hill was less than attractive.

Rather than celebrating winning a small skirmish in what will undoubtedly be a long war (one in which they are ultimately going to get their butts kicked), a number of bloggers on the right were name calling and demonstrating their own lack of familiarity with how the Wall Street Journal really works. link

Many of our fellow conservative friends are just wrong on this one.

It isn’t difficult to enforce laws against real crimes, against things like murder and robbery which everyone knows are wrong. The laws which are hard to enforce are the laws against things which are not intrinsically wrong, the kinds of laws which ordinary decent people are willing to violate, and which decent law enforcement officers are not eager to enforce. When existing laws prove unenforceable, the right answer is not to redouble efforts at enforcement. The right answer is to change the law to bring the law’s content into better conformity with Americans’ legitimate desires.

Conservatives ought to recognize that when spontaneous, voluntary, mutually beneficial economic transactions between human beings occur, that is a good thing, not a bad thing, and government should get out of the way, and not try to interfere on the basis of anybody’s theory of what the country ought to look like.

Hugh Hewitt posts a well-deserved tribute (in which he consistently refers to Power Line as “Powerline”).

For the past five years, Powerline has been the most influential blog, not just in America, but because it was so in America, also on the globe, both in terms of impact on the craft of journalism and on the course of actual events. No one can say for certain at any given time which is the most influential blog, as influence is a mysterious concept, a measurement of both size of audience, the audience’s actual power to order events, and the blog’s impact on the use of that power consciously or unconsciously. But measured over the past five years, there is no close second, period.

Powerline’s readership is both very large and very powerful. … in the first five years of the ‘sphere, Powerline set the standard for how to blog and mattered more than any other site, at least among sites that were not corporate to some extent. (The gang at The Corner and here at Townhall are professional journalists who blog. The Powerline trio, though now earning income from their site, were not called to what they did by other than their interest in events. They are like the amateur competing at Augusta –except they routinely beat all the pros and get the Green Jacket.)

Powerline’s trio are thus the most significant citizen journalists of the first age of internet journalism, and wold be even had they not toppled Dan Rather. Like it or not –and those on the left won’t– their coming into being and their writings and associated endeavors will be studied far into the future. They didn’t just occasionally make the weather in American journalism over the past five years, they changed the weather patterns. They set a standard, delivered a product, and obliged MSM to change how it dealt with citizen journalists and their work. They were aided in this by tens of thousands of other bloggers, of course, but to a degree not yet even remotely appreciated Powerline’s authors had an enormous and lasting effect on American journalism.

Andrew Sullivan got his knickers in a twist over the idea of a cartoon child-version of 24’s Jack Bauer torturing Arab children at cub scout camp.

Poor Andrew! He’s going to be in for some torture from the Right blogosohere himself. Andrew failed to notice that the story about the upcoming cartoon show was featured on a Hollywood satire site.

Quick, somebody send Andrew links to Scrappleface and The Onion.

Ann Coulter: set your Tivo. Money quote:

“We spent a lot time doing research on this game,” says Surnow. “Using a sponge, team members must take the water from a filled bucket and squeeze the water from the soaked sponge into an empty bucket. First team to fill the empty bucket wins.” Surnow said he chose the Sponge Bucket Game because it provides opportunities for little Jack to interrogate the little Arabs.

“There’s a great scene before the game starts where little Jack takes an Arab kid named Abdul and sticks his head in the water-filled bucket,” says Surnow. “Jack keeps his head under the water until he drowns. The kid did not give Jack the answers he needed, and for the greater good of the Cub Scouts of America, Jack had to send a strong and clear message.”

That’s a strong “enhanced” message. Just like Mr Tenet says.

Roger Simon celebrates 4 1/2 years of Power Line with an interview with John Hinderaker at Dartmouth.

Fortunately, Power Line isn’t going anywhere.

Pamela Geller, of the Atlas Shrugs blog, has posted an interview with Sandmonkey, the much-respected Egyptian blogger who recently announced that he was closing down his blog in the face of crackdown on blogging by the Egyptian Government.

Evidently, the democrat victory in the last election has more than a little to do with his blog shutting down.

SANDMONKEY: “Any kind of democratic reform in the country [Egypt] for the past 3 years has been rolled back specifically because there is no more pressure coming from Washington anymore.”

ATLAS: Why? What happened to the pressure in Washington?

SANDMONKEY: You know what happened to the pressure in Washington. The Democrats won the Congress. There is no more pressure coming from Bush because he is not able to push people anymore to do those things. He is not able to push the Egyptian government anymore because the American public is suddenly not interested in reforming the Middle East because of what’s going on in the Iraq. So suddenly the Egyptian government is not afraid of the American pressure. They are doing whatever they want to do. They are beating up demonstrators, they are cracking down on activists, they are changing the constitution, and eroding civil liberties once and for all and they are using proxies to take down bloggers.

Read & listen to the whole interview.

Sandmonkey Blog closing story.

The anonymous Egyptian blogger writes:

Today is going to be the day that I’ve been dreading for quite sometime now. Today is the day I walk away from this blog. Done. Finished.

There are many reasons, each would take a post to list, and I just do not have the energy to list them. As anyone who has been reading this blog for the past month, I think it is apparent that things are not the same with me. There are reasons for that:

One of the chief reasons is the fact that there has been too much heat around me lately. I no longer believe that my anonymity is kept, especially with State Secuirty agents lurking around my street and asking questions about me. …

He will be missed.

Best wishes, SM, for your safety, and a further wish that one day citizens of your country will be able to express their thoughts and opinions freely without fear of retaliation from religious fanatics or the state.

On March 14 I reported finding it impossible for several days, since around March 10 or 11, to access the Volokh Conspiracy Blog at its conventional address: www.volokh.com.

Clearly, my experience with this problem is not unique, since Glenn Reynolds blogged about this yesterday (March 18).

Professor Reynolds kindly supplies a solution which saves all of us affected the necessity of logging into our computers in Safe Mode and searching the Registry for a corrupted Host file.

All one needs to do is use Volokh.Powerblogs.Com instead.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

I am obliged to admit it: I never covered it at all.

Clinton had Janet Reno fire all 93 US attorneys, so why should there be a problem with the Bush Administration replacing 8 of them? I thought personally.

But it’s clear that those of us blogging on the Right screwed up on this one, and allowed the left blogosphere to gin up a fabricated scandal as the result of inadequate defense. (Though, Lord knows, I’m tired of defending George W. Bush, who doesn’t do much that’s effective by way of defending himself.)

Terry McDermott, in the LA Times, explains how the big-time leftie blogs did it.

over the last two months, one of the biggest news stories in the country — the Bush administration’s firing of a group of U.S. attorneys — was pieced together by the reporters of the blog Talking Points Memo.

The bloggers used the usual tools of good journalists everywhere — determination, insight, ingenuity — plus a powerful new force that was not available to reporters until blogging came along: the ability to communicate almost instantaneously with readers via the Internet and to deputize those readers as editorial researchers, in effect multiplying the reporting power by an order of magnitude.

In December, Josh Marshall, who owns and runs TPM , posted a short item linking to a news report in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette about the firing of the U.S. attorney for that state. Marshall later followed up, adding that several U.S. attorneys were apparently being replaced and asked his 100,000 or so daily readers to write in if they knew anything about U.S. attorneys being fired in their areas.

For the two months that followed, Talking Points Memo and one of its sister sites, TPM Muckraker, accumulated evidence from around the country on who the axed prosecutors were, and why politics might be behind the firings. The cause was taken up among Democrats in Congress. One senior Justice Department official has resigned, and Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales is now in the media crosshairs.

Read the whole thing.

And the moral is that we on the Right need to put on our waders and gas masks, and go trudging through the left blogosphere’s sewers more regularly than we do, keeping an eye on their mischief, so that we can demolish these kinds of attack memes before they successfully root themselves in the public dialogue.

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

Last Saturday, I clicked on an Instapundit link to a Volokh posting, and got the traditional MS Explorer negative page-not-found response.

The page cannot be displayed

The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. The Web site might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your browser settings.

Even important blogs have technical difficulties, so I simply shrugged and made a mental note to try again later.

But when the problem was still there on Monday, I concluded there was more to this than meets the eye.

About a year ago, my personal computer was infected by a Trojan, which exploited one of those only-too-numerous Microsoft vulnerabilities. It was the sort of thing which hijacks your computer to send out thousands of replications of itself covertly, degrading system performance significantly in the process.

I would never have known it was there, but for the fact that I could no longer log into Norton to update my antivirus software. The Trojan wrote to my Host file instructions directing all prominent antivirus website addresses to a dead address.

Wikipedia discusses this kind of hijacking technique in its Host file entry.

Further investigation established that my wife’s notebook was blocked from Volokh Conspiracy by the same malware. But a friend in California last night was not impacted by this problem.

I don’t recall exactly which file needs to be edited, but I can tell you that correcting this kind of problem is a lot of work. One has to turn off System Restore, reboot the computer in Safe mode, then edit the Registry to get rid of the illicit Host file entry. Entering Safe Mode is a bummer for me, because it will mess up all the icons on desk top, producing even more work sorting them all out again.

Would readers please check to see if they can link to Volokh Conspiracy, and tell me via email, or in Comments here, if they are also experiencing the same problem?