An Arab-American police officer in Milwaukee is suing for racial harassment after hearing another officer refer to him and an Indian-American officer as the “corner convenience store squad.” Meanwhile he’s become fodder for CAIR’s oniong offensive to prove post-9/11 America is a cauldron of anti-Islamic bigotry.

If you’re not depressed yet today, this Mark Steyn piece on The Death of Mother Russia should do the trick:

Russia is literally dying. From a population peak in 1992 of 148 million, it will be down to below 130 million by 2015 and thereafter dropping to perhaps 50 or 60 million by the end of the century, a third of what it was at the fall of the Soviet Union. It needn’t decline at a consistent rate, of course. But I’d say it’s more likely to be even lower than 50 million than it is to be over 100 million. The longer Russia goes without arresting the death spiral, the harder it is to pull out of it, and when it comes to the future most Russian women are voting with their foetus: 70 per cent of pregnancies are aborted. . . .

Russia is the sick man of Europe, and would still look pretty sick if you moved him to Africa. It has the fastest-growing rate of HIV infection in the world. From virtually no official Aids cases at the time Putin took office, in the last five years more Russians have tested positive than in the previous 20 for America. The virus is said to have infected at least 1 per cent of the population, the figure the World Health Organisation considers the tipping point for a sub-Saharan-sized epidemic. So at a time when Russian men already have a life expectancy in the mid-50s — lower than in Bangladesh — they’re about to see Aids cut them down from the other end, killing young men and women of childbearing age, and with them any hope of societal regeneration. By 2010, Aids will be killing between a quarter and three-quarters of a million Russians every year. It will become a nation of babushkas, unable to muster enough young soldiers to secure its borders, enough young businessmen to secure its economy or enough young families to secure its future. True, there are regions that are exceptions to these malign trends, parts of Russia that have healthy fertility rates and low HIV infection. Can you guess which regions they are? They start with a ‘Mu-’ and end with a ‘-slim’. . . .

Most of the big international problems operate within certain geographic constraints: Africa has Aids, the Middle East has Islamists, North Korea has nukes. But Russia’s got the lot: an African-level Aids crisis and an Islamist separatist movement sitting on top of the biggest pile of nukes on the planet. . . .

What would you do if you were Putin? What have you got to keep your rotting corpse of a country as some kind of player? You’ve got nuclear know-how — which a lot of ayatollahs and dictators are interested in. You’ve got an empty resource-rich eastern hinterland — which the Chinese are going to wind up with one way or the other. That was the logic, incidentally, behind the sale of Alaska: in the 1850s, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich, the brother of Alexander II, argued that the Russian empire couldn’t hold its North American territory and that one day either Britain or the United States would simply take it, so why not sell it to them first? The same argument applies today to the 2,000 miles of the Russo–Chinese border. Given that even alcoholic Slavs with a life expectancy of 56 will live to see Vladivostok return to its old name of Haishenwei, Moscow might as well flog it to Beijing instead of just having it snaffled out from under.

That’s the danger for America — that most of what Russia has to trade is likely to be damaging to US interests. In its death throes, it could bequeath the world several new Muslim nations, a nuclear Middle East and a stronger China.

A great–and terrible–piece from Steyn.

Over at the Worldwide Standard, Dan McKivergan has a great post up on Col. Wilkerson’s “cabal” theory.

From the Harriet Miers’s Blog:

Well by now you probably know that I have to “take a mulligan” on my questionnaire. Well my answer is bring it on!! Its like I’ve always said. There’s no shame in getting something wrong the first time, the only shame is giving up!!! . . .

With that in mind, I made this list of great do-overs from history to cheer me up. Maybe it will cheer you up too!! . . .

* Here’s one thats particularly relevant to me: Dred Scott Decision. Alot of people dont realize but sometimes the Supreme Court makes a mistake, I’ve been reading about it, and then they can go back and overturn it. Just like my questionnaire!!

Richard Cohen is my favorite liberal columnist, because he throws the off-speed stuff so well. This column on abortion is vintage Cohen.

Of course this has nothing to do with anything, because once she’s on the Court, Harriet Miers will hire totally smart law clerks from really hot schools like Yale and SMU to do her writing for her–but still, this Stephen Bainbridge post debunking the idea that Miers is a detail-oriented grammar maven is pretty fun.

I’ve always been a little suspicious of the stories about what a nit-picker Miers was in the White House. On October 4, the Washington Post reported that, “as Bush’s staff secretary, she was known to correct spelling, grammar and even punctuation errors in memos to the president.” If Miers really had a Rain Man knack for grammar the way some people do, then that would be one thing. Sure, it would make her look like a bit of a micromanager, but that’s not the worst thing in the world.

However, now that we can see for ourselves that she’s not really a grammar maven, it suggests that perhaps she was more of a passive-aggressive, petty bureaucrat who was always trying to impose her will, even in small ways, on materials other people were sending through her to her boss. If you’ve ever been in government, you know that this is exactly the type of appointee who succeeds at the special assistant and staff-secretary level. It is not, perhaps, the type of temperament you’d want for the SCOTUS.

Jenny weighs in on the Paris Hilton angle of the Tom Sizemore story.

You know you’re going to read it, so just go ahead and click the link already.

Ross hits one out of the park. For reals.