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.

An asteroid came within 70,000 miles of earth last week–the closest known approach in several years. That’s just a few earth radii away.

It was big enough to destroy a major city. As Jay Manifold has pointed out, if it hit a major city on the Indian subcontinent (or anywhere in the region), it might have touched off a nuclear war, given the hair-trigger situation over there.

We really need to get more serious about these things.

Tony Andragna seems to have a real blind spot on the Clinton impeachment issue, and seems to need continual fact checking.

(Stipulated: Clinton is a PIG) — the tapes only confirm that Clinton lied in testimony that the trial judge in the Jones case later found to be immaterial. No “materiality” = no “perjury” = No felony.

One more time. The judge never ruled it immaterial. This has been the Clinton spin for years, but it is a lie. (In Tony’s case, I’ll be more generous, and call it a mistake.) What the judge ruled was that Starr’s case took precedence over Paula Jones’ case.

From the January 30, 1998 WaPo:

“The court acknowledges that evidence concerning Monica Lewinsky might be relevant to the issues in this [Jones] case,” Wright wrote in her order. “The court determines, however, that it is not essential to the core issues in this case.”

“not essential to the core issues of the case” != “immaterial”

The word “immaterial” appears nowhere, in the article, or in the ruling.

The judge says herself that the evidence might be relevant. But this is what happened:

Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr had asked U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright to block all pretrial gathering of evidence in the Jones case because of the “inevitable effect of disrupting” Starr’s investigation into possible perjury, obstruction of justice and other allegations tied to the White House.

Wright rejected Starr’s broad request but, in a written ruling, banned further evidence gathering by Jones’s lawyers in “those matters that concern Monica Lewinsky.”

I don’t really expect anyone to change their minds–many will go to their grave continuing to make the false claim that the judge ruled the evidence immaterial, but for those who are interested in the truth, here it is, once again.

Tony then writes:

I don’t know for sure what Tripp’s motivation was in making the tapes –for which she was nearly prosecuted — or revealing them. I’m quite sure, though, that Tripp was mostly concerned about herself, while Rowley’s act was selfless — no equivalence.

Well, I would assume that Tripp’s motivation was exactly what she said it was–to protect herself from a perjury charge if she testified differently than Lewinsky and Clinton (exactly as Lewinisky was threatening her with in the tapes). I have no reason to believe that she’s lying about this, since there’s no evidence of her lying about anything else (unlike everyone else involved in the sordid mess). There never was a “book deal” or a “book,” so why not just take her at her word?

Yes, she was concerned about herself, and her family. Is there something wrong with that? Who was she supposed to be concerned about? The scumbags who were trying to set her up for a perjury rap?

Even though the tapes hint that Clinton et al may have attempted to pressure Lewinsky to perjure herself, there is no proof, and Lewisnky denied it in her grand jury testimony.

The tapes “hint”? Tony must not have listened to the tapes. The tapes shout.

Tripp was threatened, her family was threatened. And given her history and all the other evidence, the most likely interpretation of Lewinsky’s grand jury testimony was that she lied (just as she told Linda Tripp that she would).

And Starr might have been a competent judge, but he had no prosecutorial experience prior to this case, and his behavior was that of a bumbling fool.

Far from being the Clinton’s enemy, under the circumstances, they couldn’t have asked for a better friend…

[Update at 4:47 PM PDT]

Tony is still grasping at straws. In a follow up, he now claims that the evidence was immaterial because the judge threw the case out in April.

Sorry, it still doesn’t fly. The judge only ruled that what Ms. Jones was claiming as facts didn’t constitute harassment. She made no ruling whatsoever on the materiality of the Clinton testimony. I doubt if she herself would agree with Tony.

But let’s just ask one more question, to show into what logical knots Clinton defenders must tie themselves (I’m not necessarily claiming that Tony is a Clinton defender–his porcine characterization of the former President is duly noted, but he seems to use the same arguments that they do).

The judge granted Starr’s request that his investigation take precedence over Ms. Jones civil suit. That investigation was into perjury in the Jones case, among other things. If the judge thought that the President’s testimony was immaterial, why would she grant Starr’s request to investigate perjury?

And why did she hold Mr. Clinton in contempt of her court?

The Fox News column is up. And this time, so is the Fox web site. It’s an edited version of my post about international cooperation in space, a few posts down.