WOBBLY WATCH: H.D. Miller is reassured by Bush’s commencement speech at West Point today. Nice speech. Action to follow?

To some degree, these speeches do matter, of course, as they’re fodder for attack ads if Bush doesn’t follow through. The White House must know that, right?

LINKS have been reorganized in alphabetical order, in response to popular demand. I dropped a few that led to sites that aren’t active much (Shiloh Bucher, where are you?) and added a few “convenience” links at the top, as much for my own purposes as anyone else’s. More will follow.

DEN BESTE IS BACK! And his vacation has done him no harm.

RICHARD VAN FALK says that my proposal for letting teens out of high school early was made some years ago by Newt Gingrich. Who’d have thought it?

I’VE STAYED OUT of the whole Intelligent Design / Creationism debate raging among some weblogs. This lengthy post from Rand Simberg, however, raised the “evolution is just another religion” point that you sometimes hear from creationists. Simberg answers that just fine, but I’ve always felt that this quote from Isaac Asimov was dispositive:

It is the chief characteristic of the religion of science, that it works.

CATHERINE SEIPP has a great article on weblogs at the American Journalism Review. I like the Dennis the Menace analogy.

UPDATE: Seipp quotes Alex Beam as saying that bloggers hate him because he’s liberal. Naw. Bloggers like TAPPED a lot, and it’s at least as liberal as Beam. Jim Treacher says it best:

Dude, bloggers dislike you not because you write for a “liberal” newspaper, but because you’re a sneering dickhead who tried to pull one over on Lileks. I’m sure it wasn’t fun when it blew up in your face, but you need to get over it. You made your bed; now quit blaming the rest of us because we pointed and laughed when you shat in it.

Yep. Treacher helpfully provides a link to Pampers.Com.

TRAFFIC: Everyone’s been fighting over this statement by Eric Alterman:

The Prospect is killing on line, however, with 450,000 unique users a month at www.prospect.org. The Nation is 357,000, TNR is 275,000, and The Weekly Standard is 247,000. National Review Online claims 55,000 a day, but I don’t know what that means, month-wise.

I’m not going to get into the meat of this argument any more (several readers have expressed a preference for teen sex, or cloning, or basically anything but more discussion of the difference between pageviews, unique visits, and hits.) But by way of comparison, for the first 10 days at the new site, Extreme Tracker reports that InstaPundit had just under 183,000 unique vistors, which translates (183,000 x 3) to over 540,000 a month. That suggests to me that the figures Alterman quotes (which come from the CJR) are low. I really doubt that InstaPundit is getting more unique visitors every month than TNR and the The Weekly Standard combined. (If it is, then I should ask my boss for a raise. Oh, wait. . . dang!) I’m not blaming Alterman, but I suspect that the CJR figures are outdated, or just plain wrong.

Of course, you can click on my counter at the bottom of the page and see for yourself. I wonder why these “big media” web publications aren’t willing to do the same. What do they have to hide? It seems to me that there are two possible dynamics going on here:

(1) A general prejudice in favor of secrecy, of the sort that many of these publications impute to, say, the Bush Administration. (“If we don’t have to tell people stuff about our operations, why should we?”)

(2) A fear that if they open up their numbers, people will realize that they’re getting their asses kicked by InstaPundit, and some teen girl’s “tribute to Lance Bass” site.

Me, I’m in favor of transparency, and I’d like to see open, counters (they don’t have to be third-party counters like I use, though I suppose that adds a bit of credibility). But why not? Openness is what the web is about, and I really can’t see why this sort of information should be secret.

BELLESILES UPDATE: David Skinner reports in the Weekly Standard that the committee that awarded Michael Bellesiles the (formerly) prestigious Bancroft Prize wasn’t really qualified to judge Bellesiles’ work, and isn’t at all repentant about its screwup, though its members are, at least, embarrassed enough to decline interviews.

The members are Arthur Goren, a professor of Jewish history at Columbia, Jan Ellen Lewis, a Rutgers historian specializing in Jefferson who has written a book on his relationship with Sally Hemings, and Berkeley professor of history and women’s studies Mary P. Ryan. Skinner couldn’t get any of them to be interviewed; the weasely responses that he received are a bit embarrassing to the academy. But then, so is the whole Bellesiles affair.

There seems little reason to doubt that people lacking the expertise to judge Bellesiles work, and lacking the inclination to check it, endorsed it because they felt it was politically beneficial. The result is yet another black eye for the profession of history, and for academia as a whole.

Skinner suggests that the Emory investigation is likely to be a whitewash. I rather doubt that will be the case. But I hope that Emory realizes that the whole world is watching.

EUGENE VOLOKH has a thorough analysis of the District Court decision in which the CIPA ‘s mandatory-internet-filtering requirement was struck down.

He also gently upbraids Andrea See, though not for blogger-stalking.

VIETNAM is accusing Sen. Bob Kerrey of war crimes.

KATIE ALLISON GRANJU says that the Iranians just don’t get it when it comes to insulting Americans.

TEENTALK! Okay, I’ve pretty much burned out on the whole teen-sex item now, but IsntaPundit has more to say — particularly on the value (or not) of a high school diploma.

WHY THEY HATE US! In yer face, Osama.

BYRON YORK accusses the FBI of Clintonian lying.

It’s a bad time for the FBI. It’s been getting hammered by civil libertarians. Now it’s getting hammered from people who feel it’s not investigating hard enough.

The cop-out answer is “if we’re getting criticized from both sides we must be doing something right.” It’s also possible, of course, that when you’re being criticized from both sides you’re just doing a lot of things wrong.

ANDREA SEE finally admits that she’s a blogger-stalker. She needs to repeat sex ed, though.

JON GARTHWAITE points out that polls showing a decline in confidence in government are not really bad news for conservatives, since they undermine the public’s willingness to support new big-government initiatives, which conservatives don’t want.

Yeah. Question is, does it help Bush? That depends on whether Bush is a conservative of the sort that Garthwaite means, or a big-government Republican in the Nixon/Kristol mode. As Nixon proved, those folks don’t do well when confidence in government declines while they’re in office.

AN INDIA-PAKISTAN PEACE MOVE, thanks to a common enemy. Makes sense to me. (Via Sasha Castel.)

BUSH MAY BE WOBBLY, but he was apparently right when he said David Gregory was just parroting memorized French — and getting it wrong to boot! I don’t want to get on my high horse for this — since my last visit to Paris there has been a warrant out for my arrest from the Academie Francaise (charge: “Murdering the French language” — also lesser charges for “mutilating the French language,” “abusing the French language,” etc., etc.). But then, I don’t pretend to be a highfalutin’ globe-trottin’ Euro-connected international correspondent, either. I found this via Henry Hanks’ page.

NEVER TRUST RANKINGS. This one is self-refuting.

BILL QUICK HAS demonstrated just how smart he is, by hiring Stacy Tabb to do a site move and redesign. He’s got a new location, and this URL will work until the DNS propagation catches up, after which the old dailypundit.com address will work again.

I must say that it’s quite a handsome site. Will all blogs be this good looking soon?

BLOGGER N.Z. BEAR has a piece in Salon today. It’s his/her first professional sale. Congrats, Bear!

WOBBLY WATCH UPDATE: Reader Craig Schamp says that I’ve ruined his day:

You say that “gun rights supporters should be very unhappy with Bush.” Of course, you’re right, but why did you have to go and say that? Bush’s gun rights stance was one of the things I hadn’t yet lost hope in. Now I have nothing, with the war on terrorism looking more and more like the war on drugs (endless and ineffective, full of political posturing), the domestic policy front completely in shambles (steel tariffs, anyone?), and the cabinet full of idiots and clueless political losers.

Unless things change, and PDQ, I think any political capital that would help Republicans in the fall will have been wasted. I also think that Bush is opening himself up for more hawkish challengers. Not that any of this would be bad. It shows the dynamics of our political system. But my concern is that Bush’s loss may turn out to be more than just a political one, if all of his bumbling on the war (at home and abroad) brings more death and destruction to the home front.

Best regards.

— Craig Schamp

P.S. I have voted for a Republican for president since 1980 (voted for Carter in 1976, first time to the pools, I’m ashamed to say). I will gladly cast my vote for a hawkish Democrat next time, given the chance.

Well, a pro-gun Democrat could do pretty well, I think, and Bush is vulnerable to attack from the right on the war unless more hawkish undertakings are forthcoming. Bush did well when he kept a clear vision. He’s been muddled lately, and it’s going to hurt him if it lasts. What’s more, I predict that if his stock falls substantially it will do so very rapidly, as a number of these matters reach critical mass.

To be fair, the prosecution in DC is (I think) only for “carrying” a gun illegally and there’s a respectable argument that laws governing the carrying of weapons don’t implicate Second Amendment rights. There’s no evidence that that’s what’s motivating the Justice Department, though.

UPDATE: Bill Quick says this is a problem for Bush, too.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Best of the Web is noting the contradiction between the Justice Department’s actions and its Second Amendment position, too.

HMM. Maybe this bellicose women thing isn’t just an American fashion. . . .

BRENDAN O’NEILL offers a firsthand report from the London launch of Francis Fukuyama’s book, where he says Fukuyama was asked a lot of tough questions. O’Neill comments:

But surely Fukuyama is in danger of reducing our common humanity to a shared biology? Surely there is more to tie humans together than just the fact that we share biological features like eyes, ears, legs, arms, hearts and brains? Listening to Fukuyama, it sounded like he was arguing that human equality is a natural thing, based on biology, rather than a human-created political thing, born out of past struggles, the Enlightenment, and industrial and social development. Surely it is those human-created and human-centred values that tie us together and capture our humanity, rather than our biological make-up?

I think this is dead right. The statement that all men are created equal from the Declaration of Independence referred to political and moral standing — not natural endowments, which the Framers of the American Constitution (like Enlightenment thinkers in general) were very much aware came in unequal distributions. There are enormous differences now in people’s intellectual and physical gifts. That doesn’t prevent a polity from giving people equal respect.

THE TRAFFIC DEBATE CONTINUES: Jonah Goldberg responds to Kaus (scroll up for multiple posts), and TAPPED responds to Sullivan.

Thanks for all the helpful tech tips in the comment section below. I’m going to try to digest them after lunch.