Today’s the longest day of the year–at least on my side of the equator (down below, it’s the shortest).

Don’t spend it all in one place.

A man escaped from jail and was eaten by a crocodile.

A man escaped from jail and was eaten by a crocodile.

A man escaped from jail and was eaten by a crocodile.

Paul Sperry is wondering anew if off-line newspapers will go extinct.

“Newspapers need to realize that paper is slow, printing is slow, delivery is slow ? and slow is death. I envision a newspaper of the future that not only runs on-line, but runs around the clock.”

It’s a good piece, but he doesn’t mention weblogs.

This is a bit of good news, if Musharraf is serious, and if he can actually enforce it.

It raises an interesting question, though. Suppose we decided to do the same thing here. Would it be a violation of the first amendment?

Under what circumstances can the government ban certain teachings in schools, particularly religious schools? As an incitement to riot and murder?

And if we cut off the Saudi oil money, would such schools continue to thrive, or even survive here?

No sarcasm this time.

The National Post gets it. There can be no Palestinian state, given the current state of the Palestinians.

Now John Gibson is asking questions about the OKC/Iraq connection. They’re not the right questions–he’s assuming that the feds wanted McVeigh out of the way quickly to provide “closure for the families.”

No, John, they wanted him out of the way quickly because they wanted to minimize the chances that he would change his mind and talk, and convert Clinton’s campaign against evil right wingers into a much less desirable (to him) war with Iraq.

Did Janet Reno execute anyone else as quickly as Tim McVeigh? Did she, in fact, in the eight years of her tenure, execute anyone else, period?

The answer is no. Of course, not one else had, either. He was the first federal prisoner executed since 1963.

[Update, a few minutes later]

And here’s a related AP story.

I couldn’t come up with a funnier title for the post than the one from the Gulf News article. Check out this bit of insanity from the Middle East.

Yet another reason why we have to cut off the Saudi’s oil funds, pronto.

…radical Islamic clerics, trained in Saudi Arabia, are converting large numbers of African-American inmates not only to their religion, but to their political objectives, including virulent anti-Americanism. Colson thinks such inmates could serve the radicals as terrorists once they are released, murdering their own countrymen in a kind of “payback” for perceived injustices done to them by white America.

“There was a very deliberate recruitment process by the Saudis, trying to find black Muslims who had a real potential for Islamic learning and also for submission to their agenda. They taught Islam with the intent to expand their influence. A principal target was to stop the indigenous Muslim leadership in America from tinkering with their religion.”

This attraction of some blacks to Islam (and particularly Wahhabi Islam) remains incomprehensible to me, but if they insist on adopting the religion that originally sold them into slavery, we have to make sure that it’s not the most virulent form of it. We shouldn’t tolerate the teaching of this in prison any more than we would Naziism.