Asked about reports that a biological or chemical agent might be used in an attack on a U.S.-bound airline, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, said the United States would have no way to counter such moves.
"I don't think so, and that's partly the problem of not checking cargo, and it's partly the problem of biological weapons, which nobody has figured out really what to do about yet," Rockefeller told "Fox News Sunday." "Nobody has any idea about what to do about them on an airplane or on the ground."

: Also noted: Okrent breaks his format to give us one more item: a link to Slate's comprehensive assault on The Times Magazine's sex-slave story and the magazine editor's response.
I consider that Okrent's first blog post.

: Also noted: Okrent got a rave review from the right-wing WorldNet Daily.

: Meanwhile, Richard Bennett is characteristically blunt as he assesses the situation:

So what is happening? Briefly put, Dean's problem is the Deaniacs. The Internet-driven campaign has enabled him to amass a large following, but they're primarily unbalanced people, fanatical followers, extremists, and wackos. In my experience with Internet-enabled activism, these are the kind of people most attracted to online chat and email wars, so an organization that's going to use these tools to recruit has to prune the weirdos before they run off the mainstream people you need to reach out to the undecided mainstream people whose support you really need in the voting booth.

The BBC was at war with itself yesterday, as rival factions began to attack each other over competing versions of the events that triggered the worst crisis in the corporation's long history.
Some of its senior managers turned on the journalist Andrew Gilligan, whose flawed reporting began the crisis, claiming that if he had not resigned last week, he would have been disciplined and possibly sacked....
Others within a divided BBC want its acting director general, Mark Byford, to continue the battle with the Government....

: Meanwhile, at the BBC's own news site, the story is virtually gone; just one teensy headline and a defensive one at that, with ousted boss Greg Dyke attacking Hutton. In every other corner of British news media, this is a huge story; at the BBC, it's being buried. Now that's news judgment.

:We are witnessing the death of the BBC, for the BBC doesn't want to save itself. It would rather fight with itself and with the government than serve its audience and learn from its mistakes and move on. That's because the BBC has utterly and completely lost sight of its mission and reason for being: serving and informing the public.

: In my comments below, Silver said it well:

The whole affair points to the vast difference between press in the free enterprise system and press sponsored by government.
Why was the NYTimes contrite over Blair? Because if they lost their credibility, they lost their revenue.
Why won't the Beeb be contrite over this? Because every Brit with a TV pays their salaries (through an unbelievably stupid tax).
The world no longer needs the Beeb, and the Brits should not have to pay for it. Let the free market system determine the veracity of their reporting. The Beeb, as a ward of the state, should be abolished.

: I deeply regret this. Until very, very recently, I held the BBC in the highest esteem. When I was young, I even dreamed of working for them.
But now the BBC will get the fate it deserves.
It deserves to lose all public subsidy. It deserves to be thrown out in the marketplace to fend for itself. It deserves to face new competitors that will beat it at every measure. What Rupert Murdoch did to CNN with FoxNews, Rupert Murdoch will eagerly do to the BBC, just watch.
But the BBC brought this on itself. The BBC committed suicide.

It's more than a little ironic that, just a week after the President uses the State of the Union Address to rail against performance-enhancing drugs, we hold a Steroid Bowl brought to you by - you guessed it - performance enhancing drugs.
It all comes back to the "what's-your-pleasure" hypocrisy in this country. If your pleasure is the slurry, cheery buzz of an apple martini, you're legal and accepted. If it's the serene, introspective buzz of a joint or, say, the warm, itchy buzz of Vicodin, then you're illegal and unaccepted. If you want to risk taking a pill to get your penis hard, "ask your doctor," but if you want to risk taking a pill to get your biceps hard, pee in this cup and turn in your locker room key.
We all have our reasons for ingesting what we ingest. We are a nation dependent upon drugs to act as an antidote to everything from our boredom and depression to our impotence and the poisoning effects of our toxic food supply. To arbitrarily single out certain drugs and certain drug users as immoral, while others skate (and profitably I might add) is a complete hypocrisy.

My work here is done....
[N]ot only is Dean's nomination dead, Deanism is dead as well. By "Deanism" I don't mean Dean's mix of issue positions, or his novel strategy of Internet organizing (which, I hope, will become a model for Democrats in the future). What I mean by Deanism is the belief that some combination of technology and Dean's charisma can somehow suspend all the known laws of politics, that liberals can wish away unpleasant facts about the American electorate, and that the failure to do so represents cowardice, betrayal, and the absence of principle....
Finally, John Kerry takes all the fun out of Dean-o-phobia. Indeed, if there's anybody who could make Dean attractive, it's Kerry....