I THINK GLENN REYNOLDS is making a little much of the Islamic tendencies of the Beltway Sniper, John Muhammad. I agree that it's silly that CNN is calling Muhammad "John Williams"; the man got his name legally changed, and this sort of PC pretending that he didn't is becoming all too common. But if one reads the note that Muhammad left behind, with its fourth grade level of literacy and its fantastic schemes of a magic ATM card with a ten-million dollar balance, it's fairly clear that this isn't an Al Qaeda activity. Muhammad is simply a violent idiot, and to the extent he subscribes to violent Islamic ideologies that call for the death of infidels, it is because he is the sort of violent idiot for whom such ideologies appeal, rather than because the Islamofascists persuaded him to do it. If Muhammad were white, he would've been drawn to the Timothy McVeigh circles of black-helicopter paranoia and The Turner Diaries; because he was black, it was the idiocy of the African-American flavor--Nation of Islam--that appealed to him.

Another question is how the heck the Army admits such illiterates into their ranks in the first place, but I'm sure someone will have an explanatory comment. I blame Jimmy Carter, history's greatest monster.

AS JULIA Z. POINTED OUT to me, we've been refusing to broadcast Osama tapes and the statements of prominent Muslim terrorists for fear that they might be using coded messages to sleeper cells. So why in hell was Police Chief Moose announcing "You want us to say 'We have the sniper caught like a duck in a noose.'"?

Hooray for Captain Spaulding takes on Doonesbury better than anyone else to date:

Trudeau does bloggers today (and presumably this week) with the original punchline that bloggers have nothing to say (Check out next week's strip about two guys standing next to each other talking on their cell phones).

I don't have much to say, I will grant. Other than, at least I wasn't dopey enough to fall for the Presidential IQ hoax.

THE ROBOT WARBLOG takes on Max Power and Julia Zlotnick. I have to say the attack on Captain Spaulding was uncalled for, though.

THEY'RE ADVERTISING THE new movie "The Truth About Charlie" with Klint's "Diamond" theme from "Snatch" [track 2]. Last time I saw that, the preview for "Being John Malkovich" used "Brazil's" office worker march music [track 1], which didn't appear in the movie itself, though one can see the preview on the DVD. It's apparently not uncommon for previews to swipe music from earlier movies when the released film has not yet finished being scored ("The Royal Tenenbaums" had the music reworked between the New York Film Festival and its commercial release, for example), but it's rarely so noticeable -- perhaps other musical selections aren't so distinctive.