TORRICELLI MAY DROP OUT OF THE RACE, according to an AP report.

PORPHYROGENITUS is unfazed by the comments of Bonior and McDermott.

THE COMICS JOURNAL is critiquing Ted Rall and his “web of half-truths.” His cartoons suck, too.

There’s a discussion here. Rall’s already playing martyr.

DANIEL DREZNER has a long rant about U.S. foreign economic policy: “If our national security strategy is devoted to the building up of weak states into open economies with strong governments, our foreign economic policy seems designed to thwart that goal at every significant opportunity.”

NOTE: The University is having major Internet problems, and my access is intermittent. So response to emails, etc., may be delayed.

BIG NEWS ON THE RECORD-COMPANY PRICE-FIXING FRONT: Here’s a press release I just got by email from the Tennessee Attorney General. It’s not on their website yet, (UPDATE: Now it is) as far as I can tell:

TENNESSEE ATTORNEY GENERAL WINS ANTITRUST SETTLEMENT IN LAWSUIT ALLEGING PRICING CONSPIRACY ON MUSIC CDS

Tennessee Attorney General Paul G. Summers announced today that five of the largest U.S. distributors of pre-recorded music CDs and three large retailers agreed to pay millions of dollars in cash and free CDs as part of an agreement on price-fixing allegations.

The companies will pay $67,375,000 in cash, provide $75,500,000 worth of music CDs, and not engage in sales practices that allegedly led to artificially high retail prices for music CDs and reduced retail competition as part of the agreement. Tennessee’s share is an estimated $993,948 in cash and $1,507,852 in CDs.

“The lawsuit and settlement demonstrate our commitment to halting corporate misconduct,” Attorney General Summers said. “Such illegal activity causes our citizens to pay higher prices and distorts our free market economy.”

Tennessee, along with 41 other states and three territories filed an antitrust lawsuit in federal court in August, 2000. The lawsuit alleged the five music distributors (including their affiliated labels) and three large music retailers entered into illegal conspiracies to raise the price of pre-recorded music to consumers. The defendants in the lawsuit are music distributors Bertelsmann Music Group, Inc., EMI Music Distribution, Warner-Elektra-Atlantic Corporation, Sony Music Entertainment, Inc., Universal Music Group and national retail chains Transworld Entertainment Corporation, Tower Records, and Musicland Stores Corporation. The defendants deny these allegations.

You bet they do. I suspect that this is just scratching the surface. Can you say RICO? And where’s the United States Department of Justice on this issue?

UPDATE: Well, this makes being wrong worth it: The Tennessee Attorney General’s office emails me to note that actually the feds were on the case first — and, get this, refers me to this post on Blogcritics for more information on the subject. Is that cool, or what?

HESIOD THEOGENY THINKS I’VE “finally figure[d] it out,” but actually he’s the one behind the curve, as this entry from last December illustrates (“Radiological scam artists — freedom’s first line of defense!”). Don’t teach your grandpa to suck eggs, Hesi.

VIRGINIA POSTREL ADVISES ME to “mention the tipjar more.” Okay. It’s over there on the left.

N.Z. BEAR thinks he’s figured out another instance of rope-a-dope on inspections. Interesting. Michiel Visser isn’t so sure.

CATHY YOUNG DEFENDS HARVARD PRESIDENT LARRY SUMMERS and notes the antisemitism that more and more marks the “peace” movement:

Anti-Israel commentary in Europe not only winks at this virulent anti-Semitism (and refuses to consider it as the context for Israel’s actions) but sometimes stoops to hateful language of its own. British poet and Oxford professor Tom Paulin has said that American-born Jewish settlers on the West Bank ”should be shot dead.” Sometimes, this rhetoric unabashedly substitutes the term ”Jews” for ”Israelis” or ”Zionists.”

Even on college campuses in the United States, the anti-Jewish ”blood libel” has resurfaced in posters of cans labeled ”Palestinian children meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license.” . . .

Whether anti-Semitism plays a central role in hostility toward Israel (especially in Europe) is a complicated question. Sympathy for the Palestinian struggle – even when it takes the form of violence targeting civilians – stems largely from the knee-jerk instinct to romanticize the ”wretched of the earth,” the ”oppressed” of the Third World. Perhaps, too, as Rosenbaum argues, demonizing Israel is partly a way to assuage Europe’s collective guilt over letting the Holocaust happen. And some may use Israel-bashing as a respectable smokescreen for socially unacceptable anti-Semitic bias.

But ultimately, motives matter less than consequences. ”Traditional” anti-Semitism, too, often involved motives other than simple hostility toward Jews as Jews – including anticapitalism, since the Jews were seen as the epitome of the money-grubbing bourgeoisie. For whatever reason, extremist anti-Israeli rhetoric today has become, all too often, a vehicle for the kind of Jew-bashing that one might have hoped was extinct in the civilized world. For drawing attention to this issue, Summers deserves praise.

Also writing in the Globe, Robert Leikind makes a similar point:

When the United Nations hosted the Third World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, last year, the world community had an opportunity to address the hatred that afflicts hundreds of millions of people. Instead, the conference focused almost exclusively on allegations of Israeli wrongdoing. When protesters compared Israelis to Nazis and called for the killing of Jews, the silence from all but a few delegates made it evident that anti-Semitism was losing its capacity to evoke outrage.

Since then, that dynamic has repeated itself many times. It has three elements. First, in the name of ”human rights” or ”justice,” advocates decry Israeli actions, while also depriving them of any context. In their view, Israelis are wanton occupiers, who violate Palestinians’ rights and impose cruel conditions on a subject population. The fact that the occupation is a product of a relentless, half-century campaign to destroy Israel, that Israelis have sustained thousands of casualties from terrorism and are involved in a desperate effort to save the lives of their citizens, or that the Palestinians and many of Israel’s other neighbors continue to foment a hatred of Israel and Jews that serves as a solid barrier against efforts to arrive at a just and lasting settlement, seldom enters into their narrative. It is this absence of balance, not the criticisms (which sometimes may be warranted), that has been so troubling. . . .

Evidence is mounting that demonization of Jews is gaining respectability and that the struggle in the Middle East is providing cover for the expression of such hatred. This does not justify reflexively labeling all criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic. It does, however, compel us to ask why some critics seem interested in investing all their moral capital in attacking embattled, democratic Israel. Asking this question is not intended to chill honest debate. It is intended to create it.

(Via Jay Fitzgerald).

UPDATE: Here’s more from the Harvard Crimson.

HOWARD KURTZ REPORTS some complications in the Peretz / Gore relationship. Peretz apparently “advised” Gore on the speech, even though The New Republic editorialized quite harshly against it.

Hmm. Of course, maybe the Gore people didn’t take Peretz’s advice, which would explain why Peretz is so “uncharacteristically tight-lipped” on the subject.

James Robbins, meanwhile, writes in NRO that the speech was “superb.” No, really:

The most immediate intra-party effect of the speech is to make other Democratic leaders look weak, vacillating, and prone to compromise principles for political expediency. This is an important objective, because these are Gore’s likely opponents in the 2004 primary race. Gore has to separate himself from the pack, and make himself relevant despite the fact that he is a private citizen and has no direct input in the policy or legislative arenas. Opposing the president’s war agenda is the best tool available.

Call it reverse-triangulation. For Clinton, this would work. For Gore, I don’t think so. Mark Steyn, meanwhile, isn’t as impressed with the speech as Robbins.

I JUST HOPE THAT SOME AL QAEDA GUYS are starving to death in a shipping container because of this.

Bonus points for conspiracy theorists: Explain why this isn’t really about labor issues at all. That’s just a front, you see, for . . . .

The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.

MICKEY KAUS says the antiwar Democrats are snared in a contradiction:

No, unless Bush is planning to invade Korea and Iran after Iraq, the optimal cynical strategy for maintaining anti-terrorism as the “master narrative of American politics” would seem to require Bush, once the midterms were safely over, to keep delaying the Iraq invasion for a year or two, so that the real military crisis comes closer to the next presidential election….. In other words, to the extent that Bush is the purely cynical, self-interested dog-wagger that some Democrats (not me!) charge, he can’t also be the irresponsible cowboy who is going to rush into war in January. It’s not in his political interest.

My only question: January is “rushing?”

TALKLEFT HAS A ROUNDUP on studies concerning the dangers and benefits of Ecstasy.

JIM HENLEY ASKS what the heck the Turkish-uranium incident was really all about, and comes up with some alternatives of varying degrees of plausibility.

Regardless, I think it’s becoming clear (remember how Osama was duped?) that nuclear scam artists may be doing more good than many government programs against nuclear proliferation.

WILLIAM SAFIRE WRITES that the Administration is selling out the war on terror for a mess of corporate pottage:

Bush can say that in his 2000 campaign he promised business leaders to lift export controls. But that was before Sept. 11. Now those controls — which worked well for decades against the Soviets — need strengthening, not weakening. Perhaps our National Security Council has been getting pressure from India and Pakistan, each of which wants our missile technology. By accommodating these nuclear powers, we might gain two allies but would make the world more dangerous.

America does not need this dirty business. It amounts to only a few billion dollars in sales, and its military misuse — through copycat “reverse engineering,” a Chinese specialty — costs American taxpayers far more than that to defend against.

There’s something to this — but I should point out that export controls aren’t as simple as this makes it sound. At best, they’re porous, and there’s not much point trying to control technologies that are in widespread civilian use. In a few very advanced areas the United States has a monopoly. In the others, it doesn’t, and there’s much, much less we can do there — especially when other sources of the technology, like France, Germany, and Russia, take an, ahem, more relaxed view toward such matters.

The only really successful non-proliferation effort was the Israeli raid on the Osirak reactor.

THE ANTISEMITISM OF “PEACE ACTIVISTS” — Jonathan Alter points out the obvious:

Some argue that the blindness to Palestinian blame is merely misplaced romanticism, not anti-Semitism. The students and professors on campus with a weakness for this kind of politics also champion other oppressed peoples fighting entrenched power, and overlook their abuses. But at a certain point, persistent double standards start to smell of something more malignant. Funny how campus activists never seem to mention, say, Syrian occupation of Lebanon. They bemoan capital punishment in the United States but say nothing when the Palestinians routinely execute suspected collaborators, including the mothers of young children. They single out Israeli human-rights abuses that pale next to those of their Arab neighbors, which we know less about because of press restrictions. Anti-Zionism isn’t anti-Semitism—until it reaches a certain pitch.

Yes, and it’s reached that pitch in quite a few places.

DOUBLE STAR: Bigwig has a theory about Saddam.

KEN LAYNE uncovers a conspiracy. What’s frightening is that this makes perfect sense.

ANDREW SULLIVAN joins the list of those who regard Bonior and McDermott’s statements as near-treason:

At a time when the U.S. government is attempting some high-level diplomatic maneuvers in the U.N., when Saddam is desperate for any propaganda ploy he can muster, these useful idiots play his game. I think what we’re seeing now is the hard-core base of the Democratic Party showing its true colors, and those colors, having flirted with irrelevance and then insouciance are now perilously close to treason.

I wonder about this whole thing. We saw Gore’s speech last week, which was roundly denounced, followed by Daschle’s overheated speech, followed by this. A bunch of my readers think this is a cleverly orchestrated plan. I’m not sure about the “cleverly” part, but what could the plan be? Are the Democrats’ tracking polls so bad that they think they’re going to lose everyone but the Nation/NPR hard core among their base, so they’re just trying to energize that regardless of the cost among swing voters? This seems hard for me to believe.

The other possibility is that these guys are just idiots, and there’s no organizing principle beyond generalized hostility toward America.

This is a risky game. It’s likely to do a lot of damage in the coming elections. And if there’s another big terror attack, it’s going to kill the Democrats for years. What are they thinking? Are they thinking?

UPDATE: Reader Brian Jones emails: “‘We’ve lost on the war, so we’d better pray the war goes badly so we can look all prescient and stuff.’ That’s what they’re thinking.” How very patriotic.

Bob Bartley’s take is a bit different:

A good many Democratic Party cadres cut their teeth as anti-war protestors marching against Vietnam. Passion still runs too hot among many liberals, Democrats and intellectuals to allow mere political calculation to stand in the way.

I’m inclined to agree that it’s knee-jerkiness rather than calculation. Whether knee-jerk behavior that undermines American diplomacy at a crucial moment (and hence makes war more, not less, likely) is better or worse than calculated behavior that undermines American diplomacy at a crucial moment (and hence makes war more, not less, likely) is a matter of opinion. My opinion, to paraphrase a line from The Beverly Hillbillies, is that to me, they’ll always be jerky.

MORE ON THE WELFARE-TERRORISM CONNECTION, from The Corner.

VIDEO KILLED THE POLITICAL STARS: Martin Devon has some TV commercials planned. And it turns out that David Bonior is getting his own prime-time special.

THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE FUNNY, but it’s just realistic.

WOW, just checked downloads for Jim Lindgren’s piece on errors and misrepresentations in Michael Bellesiles’ Arming America, and it’s up to 96, 823. I guess the additional downloads are the result of new developments in the Bellesiles matter. Given that the piece is also available elsewhere, it seems sure to have passed the 100,000 downloads mark overall. It’ll pass it on this site alone before everything’s done, I’d guess.

FOUR PROTESTERS ARRESTED IN WASHINGTON were carrying explosive devices. Draft these guys — they seem to like violence an awful lot for antiwar types.