MESSAGE TO BEST BUY: Two Dollar bills are legal tender. If the report’s accurate, I think this guy’s got a lawsuit. And the rest of us have a reason not to do business with Best Buy. (Via Slashdot).

YEAH, BLOGGING’S BEEN LIGHT THIS WEEKEND: Friday and Saturday I was busy with the Insta-Wife and Insta-Daughter. Today I went to a “welcome home” party for my secretary, now back from Iraq. (The doorbell at his parents’ house played The Marine Hymn — I asked his mother if it had always done that, and she replied “Just since he left for Iraq.”) Then we went out and took my grandmother — still nursing-home bound, but doing better — out to dinner. Not that I don’t love the blog, but some things take priority.

Back later.

CHRIS NOLAN looks at misogyny in San Francisco.

IT’S LIKE THE AUTO INDUSTRY IN 1972, I’M AFRAID:

College admissions decisions now arriving across the country by e-mail and snail mail are generating the annual excitement they always do. But that momentary thrill is only masking a new reality about college in America.

With faculty and administrations leading the way, political correctness and posturing — from both the left and right — is reaching dizzying heights in the land of the ivory tower. And rising right along with it is the frustration of middle-class parents, who are growing increasingly resentful of paying sky-high tuition for colleges they see offering their kids a menu of questionable courses and politically absurd campus climates that detract from the quality of a university education.

Speaking as someone working in the factory, I’m a bit worried at the increasing dissatisfaction out there. Then again, as the biggest problems seem to be at expensive private schools, perhaps those of us at public institutions will benefit.

UPDATE: A suggestion for U.S. News:

Start measuring and ranking colleges on the intellectual and political diversity of their faculties and student bodies. . . .

I’m a big fan of diversity. As my kids approach college age, I’ll be looking at the intellectual and political diversity of the schools they apply to.

To the millions of college-shopping parents and students out there: next time you’re on a campus tour, why not ask specifically about intellectual diversity? I plan to.

I suspect that’s a trend.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Various readers point out that the University of Colorado, home of Ward Churchill, is a public university. Touché

GIULIANI IN 2008? Outside the Beltway has some thoughts.

I will say that if Giuliani is “too liberal” for the Republicans to consider seriously, it’s probably a bad sign for the Republicans’ big tent.

TIM WORSTALL’S BRITBLOG ROUNDUP IS UP: Check it out.

PEACE BREAKS OUT in Indonesia:

The large and dramatic U.S. Navy relief effort in Aceh also delivered a lot of good will for the United States, and reduced the appeal of Islamic radicalism. Islamic terrorists were never very popular in the first place, and several years of arrests, bloody terror attacks and news of Islamic terrorist activities elsewhere in the world have further tarnished their image. Thus there is less religious violence. Even the separatist rebels in Aceh are pushing for a negotiated settlement. The separatists are also Islamic conservatives, and can see which way public opinion is blowing.

Sounds like good news.

LOOKING FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE ON EARTH: At one level, this sounds a bit like searching for one’s keys where the light is better, but on the other hand, it makes some sense. Plus, a discovery that extraterrestrial life has reached Earth in the past would have significant implications for space exploration and quarantine policies. I’ve got a piece coming out in the Chicago Journal of International Law that looks at that topic briefly.

INSTA-WIFE UPDATE: Several people have written over the past few days to ask how the Insta-Wife is doing. Thanks for your interest. The answer is, pretty well. She got the go-ahead to start cardiac rehab last week, and is extremely happy to be exercising. She’s always been very athletic, and went six months without getting much exercise, which she hated. Even a modest amount of exercise has made her feel better; last night she was doing light yoga before bed.

She’s on a new and powerful anti-arrhythmic called Tikosyn, which seems to be controlling her rhythm problems quite well — they monitor her during her exercise, and she shows no rhythm problems at all, which certainly wasn’t the case before — and the side effects are less than the beta blockers. She’s on a very high dosage now, but we’re hoping they’ll back it down a bit; she still feels rather ill for an hour or so after taking it.

She’s on the road to recovery, and the overall trend is clearly upward. If it weren’t for her allergies — sadly, a standard problem in East Tennessee, where “immense biodiversity” means “every kind of pollen you can imagine, and then some” — she’d be doing even better.

Thanks very much to everyone who has asked about her, and sent good wishes and prayers. It’s all much appreciated.

AUSTIN BAY writes on peacekeeping in the Sudan.

SOMEBODY IS IMPERSONATING ME in blog comments again. If you see a comment that doesn’t sound like something I would write, it probably isn’t.

IT’S USUALLY A MISTAKE to copy things from Wikipedia without looking further into the subject. Trust me on this.

Is this part of a general slippage of standards?

UPDATE: Apparently not. At least, FreeWillBlog reports that the cribbing happened the other way around.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I notice that the Wikipedia entry on InstaPundit, now purged of major inaccuracies, contained this now-removed passage: “Reynolds has expressed scepticism about the value of [[Wikipedia]] (somewhat ironically, since the value of Wikipedia’s open process has similarities to the perceived value of the blogosphere).”

That has now been edited out, which illustrates both the strength and weakness of Wikipedia. I’m not a general Wikipedia critic, but one difference between blogs and encyclopedias — which I’m treating Wikipedia as — is that you expect something sort of finally authoritative from an encyclopedia. Not that errors won’t be corrected, etc., in future editions, but with more finality than the Wiki process produces. As I say in my FAQs, I don’t see blogs as a final authority: “As with anything else you read on the Internet, you should take what you read here as a starting point for your own research and investigation in the process of arriving at your own informed opinion (again, kind of like a card catalog) not as an ending point. I don’t knowingly link to false things without saying so, except in the case of obvious parodies, and I do my best to correct factual errors when I’m made aware of them. But a weblog is more like a rough draft than a finished product.” I guess a Wiki is, too, but somehow I expect an encyclopedia to be more of an ending point than a starting point. Perhaps that’s unfair, but I think it’s the mindset with which most people approach WikiPedia, because it ends in “pedia.” A WikiNews site would get a different reception.

MICHELLE MALKIN’S TV CAREER seems to be booming.

SEVERAL READERS have sent me links to this essay by Richard Corliss in Time, whose theme boils down to “porn was better when I was younger.”

But the most devastating take comes from the not-safe-for-work Erosblog, which observes:

The image instantly summoned in my mind is one of pity for the hypothetical wife or girlfriend of Time columnist Richard Corliss, who wrote that last squalid sentence.

Horny travelling men who don’t “summon a call girl” must be “too tired, timid or cheap”, eh?

It must surely suck to be married to that man.

Ouch. And how sad is it, really, to have to be brought up short on the subject of fidelity by a guy named “Bacchus?”

WILL COLLIER: “Unlike DeLong, I’m actually an engineer.”

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE CANADIAN SCANDALS, over at Winds of Change.

THE ANCHORESS HAS MOVED: Note the new URL.

TOM MAGUIRE HAS SOME SERIOUS QUESTIONS about the Mae Magouirk case.

UPDATE: Wizbang has more, and there’s interesting discussion in the comments both there and at Tom Maguire’s.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s a report that the hospice in question denies the story.

And there’s more skepticism here.

TODAY IS THE SECOND ANNIVERSARY OF THE FALL OF BAGHDAD: Mohammed at Iraq the Model has thoughts.

UPDATE: Mohammed’s co-blogger, Omar, emails to say that this is the second anniversary of Baghdad’s rise, not its fall. He’s right, of course, and I stand corrected.

TODD ZYWICKI has more on Dartmouth’s diversity problem.

JEFF JARVIS TALKS ABOUT PRISON-BLOGGING: You can see video here.

INSTAPUNDIT HAS A NEW AFGHANISTAN PHOTO CORRESPONDENT, Major Robert Macaraeg, who conveniently enough rotated in just as Major John Tammes rotated out. Here’s a report from Kandahar:

Here are some images from the local bazaar that is held at Kandahar Air Field (KAF). Not many soldiers are allowed off KAF to go into the city of Kandahar to go shopping, due to a few obvious and not so obvious reasons. The obvious is for safety and the not so obvious is that the US Army does not want to flood the local economy with dollars and ruin it with inflation.

All the vendors are vetted and searched for prohibited items. The bazaar site is next to the air field and then it is commerce at its best.

I asked a vendor about sales tax and he said is what that? Then I explained the concept of paying taxes and he said only in America.

The little boy at the stand was a pretty good salesman and I picked up some trinkets from him.

These gentlemen are meeting a great need of soldiers here. They sell videos to the military and they cater to their taste. The videos are cheap, but the quality is sometimes lacking. One idea that Hollywood should take from these guys is to sell multiple movies (the average is six) on one disk based on a single theme. It would be a good way to move their back catalog.

I think that putting so many movies on one disk is why the quality is lacking. I’m sure the MPAA wouldn’t approve of these efforts, either . . . .

But thanks, Major. I hope we’ll see many more photos from this under-covered region.

WONDERING ABOUT THOSE VIRGIL TATUM ADS? Henry Copeland has some background.

IF YOU’RE INTERESTED IN GUN-BLOGGING, a subject on which I have been quite negligent lately, you should check out this week’s Carnival of Cordite.

And for those with differing, er, tastes, don’t miss this week’s Carnival of the Recipes.

CBS CAMERAMAN DETAINED FOR INSURGENT TIES: The Mudville Gazette has a roundup, and Robin Burk has some observations:

All of the major news outlets need to be taking a deep and critical look at the way in which they have been using locals to report news in Iraq. Whether it be hiring the translators that used to be paid by Saddam (and still may be linked to the Ba’athists) or the ‘freelancers’ that reported for CNN and other outlets from within Fallujah and elsewhere, if the networks are going to pay these people and take their reports at face value, then they are also morally and ethically aligned with them.

Many Americans see the press as not neutral, but actively opposed to U.S. war efforts. The press doesn’t seem to appreciate the depth of the problem.

UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch emails:

The story isn’t that CBS is employing terrorists. The story is that no one is surprised CBS is employing terrorists. What’s more, I suspect that most Americans, say about 52% of them, feel that most of the MSM outlets with any presence at all in Iraq are employing terrorists.

Indeed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Roger Simon has some Pulitzer-related thoughts.

A RESOLUTION TO THE CALABRESI BUSH-MUSSOLINI-HITLER AFFAIR: Seems about right to me.

Earlier posts here, here, and here.

MORE CAMPUS PHOTOBLOGGING from Ann Althouse. Meanwhile, Rick Lee is coffee-photoblogging from a Charleston coffee shop where the wi-fi was homebrewed — by Rick.

DON’T MISS THIS WEEK’S BLOG MELA, a selection of posts from the large and interesting Indian blogosphere.

AS I SAY, I haven’t been following the Tom Delay scandals. But Michelle Cottle writes in The New Republic that the latest story is much ado about nothing.

FIRST BLOGGER IN THE WHITE HOUSE? Eric Pfeiffer says it was him. Except for Rex Hammock.

JOANNE JACOBS has sent the manuscript for her book off to the publisher.

So will this produce more blogging? Or less?

SOME FIRST-RATE FRIDAY CATBLOGGING from Sissy Willis.

GOOD NEWS: Red-light cameras are dead in Virginia. They’ve also been voted down by wide margins in the New Hampshire and Indiana legislatures.

IT’S A HATEWATCH ROUNDUP over at Winds of Change.

TERM LIMITS FOR SUPREME COURT JUSTICES: I remain skeptical.

MY TASTE IN MUSIC is not all that close to Moby’s. Interestingly, except for the Kraftwerk, the main overlap is . . . Moby. Though I tend to listen to his work as Voodoo Child, which isn’t listed, more than his other albums.

THAT’S GOTTA HURT: Steve Sturm is comparing Tom Delay to Bill Clinton.

HEH.

IN RESPONSE TO WEDNESDAY’S DUSTUP about their Bellesiles coverage, the Chronicle of Higher Education sent me this link to a collection of their coverage so that people can decide for themselves.

FEW THINGS WOULD MAKE ME LESS ANXIOUS TO OPEN AN EMAIL than the subject heading “Another Terry Schiavo Case!” But if the facts recounted here are accurate, this Georgia case involves a non-comatose, non-vegetative woman being denied care in express contravention to her living will, which means that it’s not really another Terri Schiavo case at all. I hope it will get sufficient attention to get to the bottom of this.

UPDATE: Megan McArdle has more thoughts, but there’s some skepticism in her comments. We’ll see.

JIM DUNNIGAN REPORTS that Al Qaeda is now under siege at home.

UPDATE: Donald Sensing: “I was about to write that the Iraqi insurgents are fighting Pyrrhic battles, but then I remembered – Pyrrhus won the battles that ruined him. The insurgents are being destroyed and ruined in defeat.”

THOUGHTS ON GOING GREEN, over at GlennReynolds.com.

And here are some related thoughts from Rand Simberg.

UPDATE: More on hybrid cars, and inflated mileage claims therefor, here. That’s disappointing. Next they’ll tell me that robot lawn mowers don’t live up to the hype! Meanwhile, my former student Melissa Ashburn emails:

We recently purchased a turbo diesel jetta (TDI), slightly used, for about 1/2 the price of the hybrids, and we are getting better gas mileage than most hybrids. We average 50 mpg on the highway, and 38 in city. Plus, the new diesels are completely different than the old diesel engines – they are much cleaner and quieter. The turbo action really gives it pick up and quick responsiveness as well, unlike the old diesel engines which hesitate and seem to bog down when you try to accelerate quickly. We are extremely pleased with this Jetta and highly recommend that you check it out before buying a hybrid.

We test-drove one of those when the Insta-Wife was car-shopping several years ago, and I was quite impressed.

AUSTIN BAY is interviewed by Norm Geras.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL writes that Sandy Berger is more of a clown than a conspirator:

The confusion seems to stem from the mistaken idea that there were handwritten notes by various Clinton Administration officials in the margins of these documents, which Mr. Berger may have been able to destroy. But that’s simply an “urban myth,” prosecutor Hillman tells us, based on a leak last July that was “so inaccurate as to be laughable.” In fact, the five iterations of the anti-terror “after-action” report at issue in the case were printed out from a hard drive at the Archives and have no notations at all.

This raises the possibility that Berger’s latest story — that he accidentally removed them and was afraid to try to return them — might actually be true. That scenario is less culpable, and certainly consistent with the bumbling record that Berger compiled on antiterrorism while in office. I think, however, that even on these facts if Berger had been, say, a Chief Warrant Officer, he would have received considerably harsher treatment.

OR MAYBE GM SHOULD just buy blogads!

HEY, MAYBE THEY WILL shrink the government:

The Transportation Security Administration, once the flagship agency in the nation’s $20 billion effort to protect air travelers, is now slated for dismantling.

The TSA has been plagued by operational missteps, public relations blunders and criticism of its performance from both the public and legislators. Its “No Fly” list has mistakenly snared senators. Its security screeners have been arrested for stealing from luggage, and its passenger pat-downs have set off an outcry from women.

Well, it’s a start, anyway.

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE NEW IRAQI GOVERNMENT, from a historical perspective.

IS THE NEW YORK TIMES yielding to censorship?

LET FACTION COUNTER FACTION:

President Bush’s nominee to lead the Food and Drug Administration is being blocked from Senate confirmation by two Democrats who said Wednesday that they would hold up a vote until the agency settled the long-delayed question of whether an emergency contraceptive could be sold over the counter.

I don’t think the FDA should politicize this issue; I think its decision should be based entirely on safety. Of course, as Kerry Howley notes, you don’t have to worry about pharmacists exercising “ethical vetoes” if you make it over-the-counter.

MORE MOWER-BLOGGING: I’ve gotten a lot of email on the subject of lawn mowers, but this one from Reid (no relation) Reynolds is especially interesting:

I tried one of those mowers. I should have warned you. They’re OK for touch ups in places you missed but, they’re pretty lousy overall. My lawn always looked like a kid who got hold of the scissors and cut their own hair.

If you want a quiet, environmentally conscious mower of the 21st century, this is the thing to get. I love mine and, I’ll never go back.

Mind you , mine’s the RL800 and was about half the price. Here’s the 850.

I’m not sure what the difference is that justifies several hundred bucks. One caveat: it cuts within an electronic fence you set up, which is fairly hard work. And, it cuts somewhat randomly so that, halfway through, your yard looks like the same kid with the scissors. But, it’s lightweight so it doesn’t leave tracks and, when it’s done, your yard looks smooth and beautiful. It takes a long time to finish because it goes over a lot of ground twice or thrice but, that’s time you’re not out there doing it yourself. It’s wonderful to be able to do other chores or go out and enjoy yourself and come back to a well mowed lawn. And, the neighbors sure do gawk and, it drives the dogs they are walking wild. They sit there barking at it and, it just ambles on its way, paying them no mind (which it doesn’t have, of course).

I love the idea, but after my unsatisfactory experience with the Roomba I’m skeptical. And I wonder how it would handle a slope. It’s also a bit pricey for my mowing budget. Still, if I can’t have a flying car, it does seem that I should at least have a robot to mow my lawn. This is the 21st century, after all.

UPDATE: Hey, here’s a whole list of robot servants! None look like Rosie, though.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Yeah, upsize these things to SUV-level, please.

MORE: A reader emails:

Some guy down the street from us has a robomower and it seems to work for him. His yard is fairly level, but slopes down at the sidewalk. It’s quiet and slow, but he does other things while it’s mowing.

It does seem like it would be easy to walk off with it, though…

Perhaps we need the self-defending Bolo Robomower!

STILL MORE: Another reader emails:

You might be interested in some of the lawn mowers’ military cousins — and one armed version.

Next thing, we are going to see the Terminator out there!

As I’ve said before — Bolos, please. No Terminators.

WORRIES ABOUT THE DOLLAR: Daniel Drezner collects some links.

I HAVEN’T PAID MUCH ATTENTION to the various Tom DeLay scandals — there are so many! — but here’s a roundup from Slate.

HEH: “The French government has destroyed 162,000 copies of the EU constitution because the phrase ‘incoherent text’ was printed on a page by mistake.” (Via Oxblog.)

BARN-BLOGGING: It beats “Hospi-blogging.” As I’m sure all Hospi-bloggers would agree.

JOSH WOLFE WRITES IN FORBES that it’s too early to talk about regulating nanotechnology.

SISSY WILLIS THINKS THAT KEVIN DRUM SHOULD WATCH HIS LANGUAGE: On the other hand, her headline could be construed as a bit racy . . . .

MICHAEL TOTTEN AND JIM HAKE ARE BLOGGING FROM LEBANON — with lots of photos.

THE BELMONT CLUB on Iraq:

It definitely shows to what great a depth the enemy resistance was prepared and how much they had invested in the Iraqi campaign in the long months while US diplomats tortuously attempted to obtain permission to topple Saddam Hussein. I believe that historians in retrospect will understand the Iraqi insurgency was not something spontaneously ignited by outbreaks of looting in Baghdad in the aftermath of OIF, but a meeting engagement between two prepared forces. Iraq, as Princeton’s Michael Doran observed, was intended to be the graveyard of America’s counteroffensive against terror. Instead the enemy dug the grave for themselves. What we are seeing now is not simply the rout of a few armed men, but terror’s greatest defeat in modern times.

I hope so.

WSJ POLL: “Republicans Splinter On Bush Agenda.”

The headline overstates things a bit, but I do think the poll underscores problems that some of us have been noting.

CANADIAN SCANDAL UPDATE:

Mr. Justice John Gomery has partially removed a ban on the volatile testimony from ad executive Jean Brault at the sponsorship inquiry.

However, the judge overseeing the sponsorship probe ruled Thursday that certain aspects of testimony provided by ad executive Jean Brault to the sponsorship inquiry can not be reported by the media.

“It is in the public interest that this evidence with few exceptions be made available to the public,” Judge Gomery said.

I think you’ll see some interesting discussion here shortly. I think that the blogosphere — and especially Ed Morrissey, as this NYT story illustrates — deserves some credit for this.

More here. And much more, here.

UPDATE: And Canadian news-blogger Brian Neale is all over this story.

KOFI ANNAN UPDATE:

KOFI Annan has summoned all UN staff to a meeting today in an effort to shore up his crumbling leadership of the organisation.

THE United Nations Secretary-General will address several thousand officials crammed into the General Assembly hall, where world leaders meet every northern autumn, and thousands more by video link around the world.
Aides say the embattled UN chief will deliver a “pep talk” in an attempt to buoy the spirits of UN personnel after a series of scandals, including last week’s oil-for-food report criticising Mr Annan and his son, Kojo.

He is expected to tout his recently released reform agenda, In Larger Freedom, which calls for institutional changes to revive the organisation.

Mr Annan, the first UN chief to rise up through the ranks, will find many staff angry and demoralised at what they see as the humiliation of the institution.

One mid-level official said he wanted an apology from Mr Annan, but did not dare ask.

Meanwhile, the criticism of the U.N. and its institutions just gets harsher:

Speaking at the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva, Annan said that the world body is failing to protect against human rights abuses, particularly in Sudan’s conflict-ravaged Darfur region, and should be replaced by a council with greater authority.

“We have reached a point at which the commission’s declining credibility has cast a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system as a whole and where piecemeal reforms will not be enough,” Annan told delegates.

“The commission’s ability to perform its tasks has been overtaken by new needs and undermined by the politicization of its sessions and the selectivity of its work,” Annan said.

And that’s just from Kofi!

BLOG RADIO: Jeff Goldstein and Bill Ardolino will be hosting Charles Johnson and Oliver Willis, among others, at 3 pm Eastern this afternoon.

THE PRESS IS IN PRE-9/11 MODE: Shark attack stories are back!

JOHN PAUL II — FAILURE?

It is therefore sad to reflect that the quarter century of his papacy was a terrible disaster for the Roman Catholic Church. Regular attendance at Mass* all over the traditionally Catholic world dropped like a stone all through John Paul II’s papacy. Everywhere in the great Catholic bastions of southern Europe — Austria, Italy, Spain, Portugal — the story is the same. In France, “eldest daughter of the Church,” the only argument is whether regular Mass attendance today is just above, or just below, ten percent. In Ireland — Ireland! — the numbers declined steadily from the 90 percent of 1973 to 60 percent in 1996, since when they have fallen off a cliff, to 48 percent in 2001 and heading south. A hundred years ago the U.S. Church imported priests from Ireland; now Ireland imports them from Nigeria. . . .

The debate among devout Catholics about this calamity, so far as I can follow it, is not very enlightening. Conservatives blame it all on the reforms of the Vatican II Council (1962-5); liberals blame it on John Paul II himself, saying that his firm traditionalist approach to core doctrines turned off the more open-minded Catholic laity. Both surely know in their hearts that the real culprit is the irresistible appeal of secular hedonism to healthy, busy, well-educated populations.

I am less troubled by this than some, but I rather doubt that the path actually leads to Huxley’s Brave New World.

RANDALL TERRYS OF THE LEFT:

SANTA CRUZ — UC Santa Cruz junior Jonathan Perez dressed in a suit and tie Tuesday, hoping to impress company recruiters at the campus job fair.

But more than 200 student anti-war protesters got there first, storming the Stevenson Event Center, shouting and banging on windows and demanding that military recruiters in the corner of the room leave.

The noisy sit-in ended after an hour of chaos and tension when military representatives vacated their posts. Student protesters hugged each other happily after administrators allowed them to hand out information on alternatives to military careers and agreed to a meeting to discuss future job fairs.

I wonder what the University would have done if these had been anti-abortion, or anti-gay-marriage, protesters? But in fact, the antiwar movement has been reduced to this sort of embarrassing futility because it has no real popular support outside a few enclaves. And this — frankly unpatriotic — face isn’t helping it. And, yes, it is unpatriotic to obstruct military recruiting in time of war.

And if I were an employer, I’d give UC Santa Cruz a pass, this year and in the future.

UPDATE: Reader Bart Hall emails:

The rarely-mentioned dirty secret of it all is that the military are increasingly disinclined to recruit in such places to begin with. They did not push to reinstitute ROTC at places like Harvard and Middlebury because “frankly, we’ve found that students from such institutions tend to perform poorly as officers,” to quote an officer (O-4) in a position to know.

Fewer and fewer students attending places like UCSC are of the sort who can handle the military. These institutions do not, however, yet sseem recognize their growing irrelevence and its connection to a woefully distorted and unbalanced political environment.

Ouch. And Brian Dunn adds:

Why encourage employers to skip UC Santa Cruz? Where will the folks like the guy in the suit go? And it’s not like it will hurt the protesters. What corporation wants their skill set? I don’t think Taco Bell sends recruiters to campus.

Ouch, again.

MORE: A reader says that Bart Hall has it partly wrong:

Reader Bart Hall isn’t quite accurate

When I was Marine Corps recruiter I avoided career fairs like the plague because they were a complete and total waste of my very limited time. I never landed a single enlistment from one of those damn things.

Now and then I would go because I was under orders to do so. It was all a numbers game. A career fair would generate a lot of contacts, the CO could then go to his boss and say look how busy my boys are.

I would then waste yet more of my precious time having to prove that the red hot leads this event would generate (like I. P. Freely and I. C. Weiner) probably weren’t going to result in a body at boot camp.

I’m sure they were glad to leave. I would have been.

John Stockley late of the USMC

P.S. He’s being a little unfair about Harvard. The amount of officers recruited from the Ivy League is so statistically insignificant, there is no useful data available on their performance. His Major’s opinion is strictly his own.

So noted. And another reader asks why the Randall Terry comparison. I thought it was obvious — the antiwar folks here remind me of Terry’s pro-lifers thuggishly-yet-ineffectually protesting outside abortion clinics, because they’ve lost everywhere else. Both groups even call the objects of their protests “baby-killers.”

ED MORRISSEY NOTES that American media are covering the Canadian scandals now. I think he deserves a lot of the credit for that.

LAWN-MOWER UPDATE: I did buy one of these yesterday, though at Mayo’s, not from Amazon. They told me I could bring it back for a full refund if I didn’t like it. So far, I’m not quite sure: I mowed the front yard with it and it was easy to push and did a good job, though you can’t use it as a trimmer the way you can use a powered push-mower — when you stop pushing, it stops cutting. The cut was nice, and the lack of noise was pleasant.

PROMISING DEVELOPMENTS IN KASHMIR:

Some crying with joy, 31 Pakistani Kashmiris crossed the “Peace Bridge” into Indian Kashmir on Thursday, marking the first bus service linking the divided Himalayan region since it was split by war almost 60 years ago. . . .

Attacks by Islamic separatists — who have threatened to turn the buses into rolling coffins — scared off some passengers but failed to derail one of the most significant and emotive steps in South Asia’s unsteady peace process.

“The caravan of peace has started,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said as he sent off the Pakistan-bound bus in front of a crowd of thousands braving freezing drizzle at the Lion of Kashmir stadium in Srinagar, summer capital of Indian Kashmir and the region’s heart and soul. “Nothing can stop it.”

This whole standing-up-to-terrorists business has become quite the fashion. Good!

THE SCHIAVO TALKING-POINTS MEMO turns out to have been written by a Republican staffer after all. But Mickey Kaus notes that this doesn’t help Post reporter Mike Allen as much as it might:

Allen doesn’t come off looking too good in this latest account. a) The memo was apparently not “distributed to Republican Senators by party leaders,” as Allen’s initial story, sent out through the Post news service to other papers, reported. It was–at least judging from today’s account–handed to one Democratic senator, Tom Harkin, by one freshman Republican senator (who isn’t in the party leadership); b) Allen doesn’t explain why he told Howie Kurtz he “did not call them talking points or a Republican memo” when he had in fact done just that in the news service draft; c) Even the later, more “carefully worded” account Allen published in the Post itself was apparently wrong.

Oops. John Hinderaker has more.

UPDATE: Evan Coyne Maloney notes that Mel Martinez has some explaining to do.

ANOTHER UPDATE: My sum-up? This tells us two things we already knew: The press will publish stuff without much in the way of authentication, if it thinks it makes Republicans look bad. And Republicans really were interested in politicizing the Terry Schiavo matter. On both points: Duh.

OUCH.

RICK LEE has a new photoblog.

THANKS to all the folks who’ve sent donations lately. They do a fine job of offsetting the hatemail.

KUDLOW: Leave the Strategic Petroleum Reserve alone.

BELLESILES UPDATE: Gordon Smith comments on a Jim Lindgren presentation regarding the Bellesiles affair, and points out (yes, really) a Wonkette angle.

UPDATE: Lindgren comments, and adds more background, here. The Chronicle of Higher Education comes off quite badly.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Scott McLemee, formerly of the Chronicle, disputes Lindgren’s version of events:

I’m astonished to see you retailing the nonsense about the Chronicle’s coverage of the Bellesiles affair.

Until leaving the paper recently to begin writing a column for Inside Higher Ed, I worked in the section that covered the story. (It was not my beat, but I kept up with developments at the time.) Obviously I’m not speaking on the paper’s behalf, but can tell you that the notion there was any pressure to shape the story one way or the other is preposterous. Even more so is the notion that the individual now known as Wonkette was fired for some excessive zeal in pursuit of investigative reporting. That is enough to make a cat laugh.

People are not angry because the Chronicle’s coverage of the story was unfair or unbalanced. On the contrary. They are angry at not seeing only their take represented. I suppose that Bellesiles’s supporters would be unhappy, too, if he had any.

I don’t know the truth of this — though I’ve always found Lindgren reliable — but I like the phrase “enough to make a cat laugh.”

WHAT HATH BUSH WROUGHT? This observation seems right: “A Kurdish president of Iraq? A few years ago, such a thing would have been unthinkable. Hearty congratulations are in order.” Even NPR sounded surprisingly positive.

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY UPDATE: Reader Jim Herd notes that DPreview now has a review of Canon’s new sub-$1000 8-megapixel digital SLR. Actually, it’s well under $1000 — $899 on Amazon.

Nikon’s not to be left out for long, though, as it announces the long-rumored D50, too.

IS WARREN BUFFETT GETTING A FREE PASS regarding the AIG scandal? Not entirely.

MICHAEL TOTTEN IS REPORTING FROM LEBANON, and some people are finding it inspiring.

YEARS AGO, when I was interviewed for an article on pro-Second Amendment scholars for The Chronicle of Higher Education, I was given the third degree by a reporter who found it hard to believe that so many constitutional scholars and law reviews were publishing “pro gun” articles without getting paid by the NRA.

So it’s worth noting that antigun scholars and law reviews are getting paid by the Joyce Foundation.

I agree with Eugene Volokh that there’s nothing particularly unethical about this. But I also agree that it’s worth noting that it’s going on, and has been for a while.

ED MORRISSEY is still on top of the Canadian scandals, which are getting more attention — thanks in part to his efforts.

MORE WARNINGS ABOUT AVIAN FLU: I still hope this will be an overrated threat, but I’m pretty worried.

UPDATE: Here’s a fact sheet from the CDC and here’s the WHO page.

THE MUDVILLE GAZETTE: What if they had a Tet offensive and nobody came?

POWER LINE has more on anti-semitism at Columbia.

UPDATE: Roger Simon: “Unfortunately, however, the Columbia situation is more serious than intermittent cultural relativism at the NYT or any other publication.”

IN THE MAIL: Jasper Becker’s Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea.

WATCH OUT, DRUDGE: Sploid has arrived, courtesy of Nick Denton.

If you scroll all the way to the bottom, you’ll see that Ken Layne is an editor. Which explains a lot!

DICK MORRIS ON SANDY BERGER:

Berger has admitted that he stuffed top-secret documents into his pockets, shirt and pants, and why he sliced some up with scissors, destroyed them and then lied about it. Until he gives a credible explanation for this behavior, we are all entitled to make the logical inference — that he was hiding something to protect himself and his old bosses. . . .

Berger would also have us believe he “inadvertently” cut up and “inadvertently” destroyed the documents — that he had no intention of concealing anything from the commission. And then, I suppose, he inadvertently lied about what he’d done.

Come on. With a shabby explanation like that, Berger invites speculation that he is covering for himself or for the Clintons.

Back in the ’90s, I found Berger consistently unwilling to act vigorously against terror-sponsoring nations. When Sen. Al D’Amato proposed sanctions against Iran, Berger tried to get Clinton to veto the bill; it was only after much public pressure that he signed it.

Berger was on a fast track to be the next Democratic Secretary of State. He risked that in stealing those documents. Now he has destroyed his future career by pleading to a criminal misdemeanor — admitting what he did while still concealing why he did it.

Read the whole thing.

HOW MUCH BETTER ARE THINGS IN IRAQ? Compare the situation today with this post from a year ago.

On the other hand, violence seems to be on the upswing in France:

On March 8, tens of thousands of high school students marched through central Paris to protest education reforms announced by the government. Repeatedly, peaceful demonstrators were attacked by bands of black and Arab youths–about 1,000 in all, according to police estimates. The eyewitness accounts of victims, teachers, and most interestingly the attackers themselves gathered by the left-wing daily Le Monde confirm the motivation: racism.

Some of the attackers openly expressed their hatred of “little French people.” One 18-year-old named Heikel, a dual citizen of France and Tunisia, was proud of his actions. He explained that he had joined in just to “beat people up,” especially “little Frenchmen who look like victims.” He added with a satisfied smile that he had “a pleasant memory” of repeatedly kicking a student, already defenseless on the ground.

Another attacker explained the violence by saying that “little whites” don’t know how to fight and “are afraid because they are cowards.” Rachid, an Arab attacker, added that even an Arab can be considered a “little white” if he “has a French mindset.” The general sentiment was a desire to “take revenge on whites.”

Will France improve as much in the coming year as Iraq has in the past year? Doubtful.

PRAWFSBLAWG is a new blog by “youngish law-professor types.”

A WHILE BACK, I joked about buying one of these. After spending the morning screwing around with my allegedly reliable Honda, I’m getting more and more tempted.

UKRAINE UPDATE: Some thoughts on Yushchenko’s visit.

MEDBLOGATHON: This week’s Grand Rounds is up!

UPDATE: And don’t miss the Carnival of Education, a collection of — you guessed it! — education-related posts.

DEFINING VICTORY IN THE WAR ON TERROR: Austin Bay has an email from a Senior Military Official giving the view from Iraq.

“HOW MANY MORE MUST DIE, BEFORE KOFI QUITS?”

Here, too, is Annan’s faxed response – ordering Dallaire to defend only the UN’s image of impartiality, forbidding him to protect desperate civilians waiting to die. Next, it details the withdrawal of UN troops, even while blood flowed and the assassins reigned, leaving 800,000 Rwandans to their fate.

The museum’s silent juxtaposition of personal courage versus Annan’s passive capitulation to evil is an effective reminder of what is at stake in the debate over Annan’s future: when the UN fails, innocent people die. Under Annan, the UN has failed and people have died.

His own legions have raped and pillaged. In two present scandals, over the oil-for-food programme in Iraq, and sex-for-food in Congo, Annan was personally aware of malfeasance among his staff, but again responded with passivity.

Having worked as a UN human rights observer in Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti and Liberia, there are two savage paradoxes for me here. The first is that, while the media and conservative politicians and pundits have suddenly discovered that the UN has been catastrophically incompetent, this is very old news to anyone with the mud (or blood) of a UN peacekeeping mission on his boots. . . .

The second searing irony for me is that the American neoconservative right has occupied the moral high ground in critique of Annan, outflanking the left, which sits on indefensible territory in his support. But if prevention of genocide and protection of the vulnerable are not core priorities on the left, then what is? If anyone’s values have been betrayed, it is those of us on the left who believe most deeply in the organisation’s ideals.

And yet, the UN keeps being held up as a symbol of civilization and lawfulness by those who should know better.

HOWARD KURTZ HAS PICKED UP ON THE CANADIAN SCANDAL STORY, making it officially news for the American media:

Yes, our democratic neighbor to the north, which lacks a First Amendment and has a somewhat narrower view of press freedom, is cracking down on an American blogger for reporting on a corruption investigation that apparently has to do with advertising contracts being steered to politically connected firms. The blogger is Ed Morrissey of Captains Quarters, and this London Free Press story brings us up to date:

“A U.S. website has breached the publication ban protecting a Montreal ad executive’s explosive and damning testimony at the federal sponsorship inquiry. The U.S. blogger riled the Gomery commission during the weekend by posting extracts of testimony given in secret Thursday by Jean Brault.

“The American blog, being promoted by an all-news Canadian website, boasts ‘Canada’s Corruption Scandal Breaks Wide Open’ and promises more to come. The owner of the Canadian website refused to comment.

“Inquiry official Francois Perreault voiced shock at the publication ban breach, and said the commission co-counsel Bernard Roy and Justice John Gomery will decide today whether to charge the Canadian website owner with contempt of court.”

He’s got much more.

MORE BLOG CARNIVALS: Tangled Bank is a carnival of science-blogging. Meanwhile, Proverbs Daily is hosting the latest Christian carnival. And I somehow missed last week’s Carnival of the Liberated. There are so many now that I can’t keep track!

DEREK LOWE’S BROTHER HAS DIED: Please send him your thoughts and prayers.

RYAN SAGER RESPONDS TO HIS CRITICS: I think that, once again, he comes out on top.

Meanwhile, I don’t even have to respond to mine, as someone else has done it for me.

SAUL BELLOW HAS DIED: I join Roger Simon in offering condolences to his son Adam, who was involved with my last book.

LIKE ANN ALTHOUSE, I found time to wander campus for a little while this afternoon. And, like Ann, I found student electioneering underway, though without the rock’em-sock’em approach.

Skateboarding is not a crime, as we’re often told. You see less of it on campus than you did a few years ago, though.

Professors still hold class outside on nice days.

Outdoor snacking is also popular.

Though in an earlier post, I noted that it was mostly women who seemed to be walking and chatting on cellphones, men do use them — though this guy is a Physical Plant staffer, not a student.

It does seem, though that most of the people walking around and talking into cellphones are women. I certainly hope that cellphones don’t turn out to cause cancer or something. If they do, the gender imbalance that Ann notes on college campuses is likely to be reversed in future generations, because my casual observation suggests that female college students get several times the RF exposure from cellphones that men get.

I tend to think that the cellphone-danger bit is overblown. I certainly hope I’m right, because if it’s not, things are going to turn out badly.

CORNYN CLARIFIES:

As a former judge myself for 13 years, who has a number of close personal friends who still serve on the bench today, I am outraged by recent acts of courthouse violence. I certainly hope that no one will construe my remarks on Monday otherwise. Considered in context, I don’t think a reasonable listener or reader could.

As I said on Monday, there’s no possible justification for courthouse violence. Indeed, I met with a federal judge, a friend of mine, in Texas just this past week, to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to protect our judges and courthouse personnel against further acts of violence. And like my colleague from Illinois, I personally know judges and their families who have been victims of violence and have grieved with those families.

But I want to make one thing clear: I’m not aware of any evidence whatsoever linking recent acts of courthouse violence to the various controversial rulings that have captured the nation’s attention in recent years.

My point was, and is, simply this: We should all be concerned that the judiciary is losing the respect that it needs to serve the American people well. We should all want judges to interpret the law fairly – not impose their own personal views on the nation. We should all want to fix our broken judicial confirmation process. And we should all be disturbed by overheated rhetoric about the judiciary, from both sides of the aisle. I regret it that my remarks have been taken out of context to create a wrong impression about my position, and possibly be construed to contribute to the problem rather than to a solution.

Our judiciary must not be politicized. Rhetoric about the judiciary and about judicial nominees must be toned down. And our broken judicial confirmation process must be fixed, once and for all.

So there. Though if there are no links, why did he raise the subject? Or, as Ann Althouse notes: “Politicians know the spiciest part of a speech is the sound bite. Edit it out if you don’t mean it.”