HEY! The American Prospect has a blog, though they don't call it a blog, and they don't have the common sense to keep it on a single URL that doesn't change every day so that other people can consistently link to it.

UPDATE: Let the record reflect that the above entry does not call the Prospect blog "stupid", as otherwise accused. There's clearly a niche for a liberal counterpart to NRO's Corner, which suffers from too much Kathryn Lopez. I'm merely expressing disappointment that I can't hard-code a link to the Prospect blog, and calling attention to the poor web-design choice it reflects. (The fact that a link from such a low-traffic site such as this one caught the eye of the Prospect is clear evidence that they're doing something wrong.) I similarly don't link to the ABC News weblog, because it only provides cut-and-paste URLs, and no hypertext links. (The best pre-September 11 weblog was the one Inigo Thomas did for Slate before they turned it into "Idea of the Day," then made it impossible to link to, and then just killed it.)

AIRPORT SECURITY. Some do-good organization was on the radio this morning, complaining about a recent study that showed that current security measures fail to detect guns 30% of the time. This bothers me. Not the 30% failure rate, but the fact that someone is concerned enough about it that they might take steps to make air travel even more inconvenient, while reducing the failure rate to 15-20%. As Malcolm Gladwell points out, no amount of "training" is going to help screeners who, simply put, are looking for the needle in the haystack on a straw-by-straw basis. Terrorist organizations aren't going to attempt to hijack a plane by hoping for that 30% chance to come their way. The September 11 hijacking came about because of four separate security holes that effectively gave terrorists 100% chance of success:

1. The porous border with Canada, and the lack of INS follow-up on student visas.

2. There was no prohibition on the carry-on of box-cutters and other sharp items that could be used as weapons.

3. There was no profiling, be it El-Al style or otherwise, of passengers who could be said to be more likely to have nefarious intent.

4. The learned response, over the last thirty years, was to acquiesce to hijackers' demands.

It took less than two hours for the fourth hole to close, as the passengers on Flight 93 quickly decided to fight back. The second security hole has closed with a vengeance, as grandmothers lose their nail-files across the nation. It's hard to know where we stand on the first hole (which was arguably only 95% open pre-September 11, given the capture of Zacarias Moussaoui); I presume we'll learn the hard way after the next terrorist attack that it's still open. And we're in a strange situation with the third hole, where everyone denies that such profiling is taking place (thanks in part to a gutless White House refusal to stand by such a common-sense procedure on political correctness grounds), but there are enough strange incidents of false negatives going on that one suspects a group of five Arab men with one-way first-class tickets paid in cash is likely to get some additional scrutiny.

I question whether 30% of guns are getting through, or whether it's that 30% of guns are getting through one round of screening. In any event, if 30% of guns are getting through now, at least that many were getting through in pre-September 11 days. But the September 11 plan was not to send 100 hijackers onto 100 planes and hope that 30 of them got through -- it was to take advantage of the parts of the security system that weren't guarded at all. The next terrorist attack isn't going to come because there was a breach of existing security procedures, it's going to come at a place where we don't have security in place. Even the Palestinians, who are self-satisfied when their suicide bombers blow themselves up at checkpoints two times out of three, prefer to find holes in the Israeli security apparatus (teenage girls are checked less frequently than men? start using teenage girls as suicide bombers). Instead of spending millions directly in federal money and indirectly in traveler inconvenience to making sure the barn-door is completely closed after the horses have fled and confiscating every last nail file, we need to be thinking creatively about where our weak spots are and what the next terrorist attack is going to look like.

What gives me nightmares: I have no reason to be thinking about this stuff, and I can think of numerous fairly catastrophic scenarios that me and my five most jihad-loving friends could pull off were we so inclined. How many dozens of people that are so inclined are thinking about this in more than fleeting moments? And how many of them were marching in my city this weekend?

IT'S FUNNY BECAUSE IT'S TRUE, PART TWO: From an e-mail, source undetermined:

A young man was crossing a road one day when a frog called out to him and said, "If you kiss me, I'll turn into a beautiful princess."

He picked up the frog and put it in his pocket.

The frog spoke up again and said, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, I will stay with you for one week." The man took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it and returned it to his pocket.

The frog then cried out, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I'll stay with you and do anything you want."

Again the man took the frog out, smiled at it, and put it back into his pocket.

Finally, the frog asked, "What is the matter? I've told you I'm a beautiful princess. What more do you want? Why won't you kiss me?"

The man said, "Look, I'm a lawyer. I don't have time for a girlfriend, but a talking frog is kinda cool."

(It's not often that I get a lawyer joke I hadn't heard before...)

IT'S FUNNY BECAUSE IT'S TRUE, PART ONE: Modern-day press coverage of the Exodus.

As I feared a month before it happened, the Volokh Bros. blog is one of the best out there. Recently: Sasha does a sound analysis of the French election; Eugene is making debunking of the Slate Bushisms a recurring feature.

INAPPROPRIATE LPGA golf trophy.

EUGENE VOLOKH notes that inflation-adjusted per capita education spending has increased from 1959-60 to today.

I have no doubt Professor Volokh's numbers are correct. I would suggest that there are at least two reasons why the comparison is one of apples to oranges.

Most notably, the 1959-60 labor market was a much different place than it is today. Educated women were disproportionately steered into the teaching profession because of discrimination in other fields. Education (and nursing) received the benefit of the resulting market inefficiencies by being able to obtain highly qualified candidates at well below their true market values. I daresay that today's teachers are both paid more and are, I strongly suspect, less qualified than those of 40 years ago: an educated woman now has a panoply of career choices available to her, and may not immediately choose teaching. Society as a whole is better off, but the effect is to make education more expensive.

Second, it would be useful to determine the increase in spending caused by the unfunded mandate of the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, a good-intentions-but-damn-the-consequences federal law that did not exist forty years ago, but definitely creates burdens on the education system.

STEVE KUHN CALLS the NFL draft socialistic.

There is, of course, a fundamental difference between the 32 NFL teams and law firms, in that the latter compete with one another for customers, while the former are 32 parts of a single enterprise competing for customers with other entertainment enterprises. The single enterprise of 32 teams wants to maximize the entertainment value of contests between the teams, and it thus behooves the enterprise to take some steps to equalize the competitiveness of each of the teams.

A better comparison would be between the NFL Draft and a single law firm that hires 100 first-year associates, and then parcels them out amongst the various departments within the law firm depending on those departments' needs, though even that analogy isn't spot on.

Certainly, the draft's creation of a monopsony (single buyer) situation serves to reduce player salaries, in part because there is only one football league, and most NFL players are already too specialized to take their talents to a competing sports league such as baseball or basketball. But the draft is one of many things that are the subject of collective bargaining agreements between sports leagues and their players' unions.

THE FIRST ROUND of nominations on the warblogging book have been posted.

READER E-MAIL. LAN3 from Seattle writes

Let's use the name "Oil Libel" for the absurd theory, often asserted as part of a more horrifying grand conspiracy theory, that the reason we're asserting military power in [insert Middle Eastern or Central Asian nation here] is that we want to keep oil prices low, to install a pipeline across said nation, or to install a friendly tyrant who'll assure a continued supply. Congresswoman McKinney is the most recent, most public example, but it's a well-worn saw for Nader, Moore, and so many others.

I like it. "No Blood For Oil" is bad enough as a knee-jerk slogan and blanket rule; it's worse now that it seems to have become "No Blood In Any Circumstances Remotely Related To Oil." Meanwhile, if, as Cynthia McKinney states, we need to investigate Bush's role in September 11 because of his oil interests, shouldn't we be investigating Rep. McKinney for receiving money from pro-Hamas supporters?

McKinney is in a different ballpark than Moore and Nader. The latter two are more culpable for their role in the Oil Libel, because they should surely know better. McKinney seems somewhat more insane. (Note that Slate hedges its bets by calling McKinney the nuttiest woman in Congress. That's because Rep. Traficant hasn't been thrown out yet. Trial description here.)

Anyway, if there's something you want to do about Rep. McKinney, the best hope is to get someone sane into Congress. A nationwide campaign got the previous holder of the most-insane award, Bob Dornan out of Congress. Judge Denise Majette is running against Rep. McKinney in the primary, and can't possibly be any worse. I might even be donating myself if she wasn't announcing March 12 "fundreasers" on April 17.

INSTAPUNDIT endorsing one of your posts = a lot of hits.

Instapundit comparing you to a porn star = a frightening number of hits.