A MCKINNEY / BELLESILES CONNECTION? Well, only in the most tenuous sense. But Bellesiles is certainly being treated with kid gloves compared to this guy, who does have a McKinney connection of sorts. The link comes from Martin Grace, a professor at Georgia State University, who argues that Emory has a general governance problem:

Emory has a history of making bad decisions about tenured faculty. The decision to fire tenured faculty might the correct one for the institution and they may have legal grounds to do so, but they appear to do it often without even a level of minimal due process. There have been a number of cases of recent note and I have linked an article from the Emory newspaper that talks about a particular case. However, as one reads further we see that Ms. McKinney (and her dad) got involved in the case. She is a lame duck now, but she still fight for the “little guy” if she so desires.

Perhaps the reticence of Emory to “firing” a tenure faculty member and actually contemplating paying him off is because of the lack of understanding about what is permissible faculty behavior and what is not _and_ Emory’s previous attempts at termination were met with litigation and alleged million dollar pay-offs . . . They may think it may be cheaper just to pay Bellesiles off now.

The senior administrators there have always called the shots and they have

done it rather poorly in the past. Why expect anything different today?

PS. I have no connection to Emory other than that I live in the

neighborhood. I know a couple of people who work there now and some who

used to work there.

Interesting. As I said earlier, we’ll just have to see what develops.

IT’S PROBABLY UNFAIR, but when I think of the sustainability summit in Johannesburg, I’m reminded of last year’s racism summit in Durban. Let’s hope that this one works out better.

HASHEMITE UPDATE: I meant to post on this yesterday, but the press of Bellesiles- and Mineta-related developments (and the fact that classes started) kept me from getting to it. But in yesterday’s National Review Online David Pryce-Jones reflected on the possibility of a Hashemite transitional ruler for Iraq. Today, Claude Salhani disagrees. There’s a passing mention in both pieces of a different Hashemite role, as custodians of Mecca and Medina, too.

PART THREE of Armed Liberal’s series on terrorism is up. The whole series is worth reading.

BELLESILES UPDATE: The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that Bellesiles will be gone for a year, not just the Fall semester as reported earlier. (You have to be an online subscriber to read the story, but the headline is on the front page.)

Some readers suggest that they’re just getting him off campus as a prelude to a buyout/severance deal. Well, maybe — though why Emory would want to “buy out” a guy who’s been credibly accused of fraud (and who obviously hasn’t been exonerated by their intensive investigation) is beyond me. I suppose the answer will be forthcoming eventually.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh has found the explanation for the whole affair.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader who has an online subscription says that although the headline says a year, the article says he’s on leave for a semester. Uh, okay.

WILL WARREN HAS A NEW POEM inspired by Cynthia McKinney’s defeat. It’s a good one. They don’t call him the “poet laureate of the Blogosphere” for nothing.

BAD NEWS FOR THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT:

The secretive federal court that approves spying on terror suspects in the United States has refused to give the Justice Department broad new powers, saying the government had misused the law and misled the court dozens of times, according to an extraordinary legal ruling released yesterday.

A May 17 opinion by the court that oversees the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) alleges that Justice Department and FBI officials supplied erroneous information to the court in more than 75 applications for search warrants and wiretaps, including one signed by then-FBI Director Louis J. Freeh.

This shouldn’t be a big surprise to regular InstaPundit readers, but it’s certainly an embarrassment for DoJ. But maybe it’ll be a wakeup call.

Probably not.

THE PEACE MOVEMENT’S BIG TENT? The folks at Vanguard News Network send this gloating email:

Ha ha ha

Support for an American attack on Iraq is dropping daily, but the

warmongering Gallup Poll leads with the headline ‘Majority of Americans Favor Attacking Iraq to Oust Saddam Hussein’.

Of course, if you look at the poll, it does show a majority of Americans supporting the war. Maybe next the Nazis at VNN will start impugning their masculinity. . . .

UPDATE: Hey, and they’re going to have a rally against the war in Washington, too. I guess the Peace Movement really is gathering steam, huh? Well, it’s already conquered France.

PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH responds to a growing trend among antiwar folks of impugning the masculinity of prowar folks while engaging in chest-pounding displays on their own. He finds one particularly amusing example of what can only be called playground-level bluster, which is odd considering that antiwar folks are usually hurling accusations of such bluster elsewhere.

BELLESILES UPDATE: Melissa Seckora reports:

EMORY’S STATEMENT ON MICHAEL BELLESILES: [Melissa Seckora] “Professor Michael Bellesiles will be on paid leave from his teaching duties at Emory University during the fall semester. The University’s inquiry regarding Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture is continuing. Professor Bellesiles and the University have agreed that the results of the University’s inquiry will be made public when the inquiry is completed.”

I’m not quite sure what to make of this. More later.

UPDATE: Michael Tinkler emails these observations:

1. paid leave because they’re not able to come to a decision.

2. will be made public because of the pressure from the professional world (that is, you as a professor of law and Prof. Lindgren) not from the blogosphere. However, they know the blogosphere is watching, some of them are part of it, and they know that publicity is not helpful here.

I have had a few irritable emails and a very irritating telephone conversation about the way universities work. I keep trying to explain that Emory is NOT a multiversity and that though there are a several other American historians there is no one who really overlaps Bellesiles so OF COURSE there was no one in the department competent to drop the guillotine.

Emory did something with some ‘experts’ over the summer – can you, a law professor, imagine how much it would cost to get 3-6 senior history professors (and they have to be senior) to come to campus (and I think they would have to meet in person at least at the start, though they could write their report without physical proximity) and to toss their planned research out the window for 2 months to deal with this?

The senior folk they brought in were NOT up to Prof. Lindgren’s numeracy – as he suggests on occasion many humanists are incapable of the statistical understanding necessary (though there’s a Latin America specialist in the Emory department who should be – a really good demographer).

–what follows is the rankest of speculation–

My read – the outside committee delivered a damning report, but with some caveats along the “we have not had the time or the resources to investigate the

archival material.”

That would leave Michael Bellesiles room to appeal on those grounds. Emory is nervous and is willing to give him the term with pay to try to reconstruct some

archival research.

We’ll see.

Very interesting thoughts from someone with far more insight into the discipline, and Emory itself, than I possess. I rather doubt that Emory is feeling much pressure from me; in fact, I have no particular reason to think that any Emory administrators are even aware of InstaPundit. But there’s a lot of discussion of Bellesiles among historians and legal academics, and although people were slow to face up to the reality of what was going on, most people (including, perhaps especially, some of those who were his biggest backers initially) are now pretty unhappy with him and that has to be putting pressure on Emory not to ignore the problem or paper it over — which, by now, has to be pretty obviously impossible.

Several other readers, though, sent messages like this one:

My take on the situation:. It looks like they’re stalling for time. Maybe they’re hoping this will blow over and they can deliver a token punishment to the guy when no one cares anymore.

That’s possible, but I tend to doubt it. They’re just keeping the matter open, and it’s just going to cause Emory’s reputation to suffer during another academic year. That’s going to hurt hiring, graduate student recruitment, and general position as the department gets the reputation of being “troubled.” There’s no benefit there.

GEITNER SIMMONS HAS SOME GOOD THOUGHTS on dissent, patriotism, and moral seriousness.

HOMELAND SECURITY IS A JOKE. So why are they wasting time on this? While this goes unpunished.

CONTENT-BASED SPAM FILTERING: This is an interesting approach. Actually, if I could just delete email that was more than 20% capital letters, it would cut down on (1) crank email; and (2) nearly all the Nigerian scamspam.

I’M GOING TO BE ON KTSA radio in San Antonio in about an hour (just after 5) talking about air security. Sadly, there’s no Internet stream, but if you’re anywhere in that part of Texas give it a listen — it’s 550 AM.

TAPPED doesn’t like Josh Chafetz’s piece on Maureen Dowd. Josh is being too “literalist.”

Well, one of the many objectionable things about Dowd’s writing is that it always has this layer of I-was-just-joking-around deniability to it. (Kinda like Ann Coulter, who doesn’t get that benefit of the doubt). But I don’t think Josh was confused about what Dowd was saying. I think that Dowd was confused about what Dowd was saying.

And I’m pretty sure that Josh, who’s an American student at Oxford, is of draft age. Though, of course, that’s kind of a meaningless term since there’s no draft. — Damn! Now I’m getting carried away with the literalism!

UPDATE: Reader Gerard Vanderleun writes:

I find this little statement of “obvious fact” rather ill considered:

“The only people hot to fight this war are a bunch of nerdy chickenhawks brandishing grandiose plans to remake the Middle East.”

It has the overwhelming aspect of being, from the get-go, utterly untrue. I could introduce TAPPED to a number of New Yorkers of all ages, sexes, and classes whose only problem with the war is that it is not killing enough of the right people quickly enough. And that’s just New York. You start wandering around in what passes for the heartland and the incidence of American flags starts to go up as well as the bumper stickers and other visible forms of opinion proliferate. Perhaps TAPPED means the count of people in favor of the war is low within the circles in which they lunch and dine. From my own experience, this is not an unusual reality filter [their] environment. They really need to get out more. After all, they are actually taking Dowd seriously.

Ah well, TAPPED has failed to learn from the Book of Eastwood: “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

Vanderleun hosts this website, which shows where he stands. And good for him.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Bill Quick’s site has an extended discussion of the whole “chickenhawk” line — currently being substituted for actual argument by a number of antiwar bloggers — and pronounces it an antigay slur.

SOMETHING ELSE FOR EUROPEANS TO WORRY ABOUT:

Higher fertility rates and immigration produce not only a larger population but a society that is younger, more mixed ethnically and, on balance, more dynamic. The simplest expression of this is median age (by definition, half of the population is older than the median age, and half younger). According to Bill Frey, a demographer at the University of Michigan, the median age in America in 2050 will be 36.2. In Europe it will be 52.7. That is a stunning difference, accounted for almost entirely by the dramatic ageing of the European population. At the moment, the median age is 35.5 in America and 37.7 in Europe. In other words, the difference in the median age is likely to rise from two to 17 years by 2050.

Behind this change lie demographic patterns with big policy implications. The percentage of children in the population is falling as populations age. But in America it is falling more slowly than elsewhere. In 1985, America and Europe had more or less the same proportion of the population under 14 years of age: around 20%. By 2020, the proportion of children in Europe will have slumped to 13.7%. In America it will still be 18.6%—not only higher than in Europe but higher than in China and Japan, as well. . . .

Perhaps none of this is altogether surprising. The contrast between youthful, exuberant, multi-coloured America and ageing, decrepit, inward-looking Europe goes back almost to the foundation of the United States. But demography is making this picture even more true, with long-term consequences for America’s economic and military might and quite possibly for the focus of its foreign policy.

From The Economist, via The Sound and the Fury.

MICKEY KAUS HAS BEEN PROMOTED, from rhinoceros to “a huge mutant God-King Rhinoceros.”

I told him to get that mole looked at when I saw him at the L.A. Blogger Bash.

MARK STEYN WRITES that there’s no excuse for rape, and that those who seek to blame the victim should be ashamed. But there seem to be more and more of them.

JOSH MARSHALL sums up his war with the Post. Maybe he should just change his site name to something more generic. Like, say, The Federal Page.

WHY ONLINE MUSIC doesn’t hurt CD sales. A compelling argument from Scott Rosenberg.

DON’T LEAVE HOME WITHOUT IT.

STEPHEN GREEN says we should think of the Saudis as a crazy ex-girlfriend. Personally, I think that’s kind of creepy.

I’VE QUIT WITH THE CORNEL WEST UPDATES, but this one is too good to pass up: Nick Danger is reporting that West will appear in the Matrix sequels as a “Counselor West.” And, amazingly, it’s true!

BELLESILES UPDATE: Melissa Seckora reports that a decision has been made on Bellesiles and will be announced by Emory tomorrow.

MINETA IMPEACHMENT UPDATE: I’ve gotten a flood (er, a bigger flood than usual) of email in response to my FoxNews column on airport security. Here are some excerpts:

As a frequent business traveler, I recently informed Continental Airlines that their harassment was so pervasive, that I had increased my drive-to cutoff time to 12 hours.

Their response ‘It’s not our fault – complain to the TSA’.

My response ‘Who will keep Continental afloat when the business traveler quits flying?’

—-

I refuse to fly. I refuse to be humiliated by those stupid, arrogant punks that call themselves “airport security”.

If official TDY (temporary duty) comes along, I take leave or get permissive TDY to drive or use other conveyance. (BTW, it saves the taxpayers a ton of $$$ by driving.) . . .

I truly hope that every airline goes belly up and puts every airport screener and other scumbag doofus out on the street.

—

Security should be geared to check for two things: fire arms and bombs. And we ain’t checking for bombs! I will gladly take my chances with a nail file wielding lunatic than put up with this insanity called airport security.

—

I didn’t think I could laugh so much over anything to do with airport security but “The revenge of the tweezers people” is perfect. I fly at least once a month (this summer has been every week). You need to add one more category to the people randomly chosen to be searched – blonde, petite ( and harmless), American women who would never dare to wear an under bra! I’m really sick of it. I’m normally nice to people but I make no effort to be with the stupidity of the system I see.

—

Airport security is a bone-headed charade that irritates all and protects none. Lord knows we need protection from 85-year old grandmothers and explosive breast milk! Any frequent traveler, as myself, has learned to avoid the screening. To me the absurdity was a recent flight where two volunteers were asked to submit to the “random” security check to expedite the boarding process.

—

I have to travel every week and it always by air, that works out to about a 100,000 miles a year. You are right about “security”, it is a joke. If I did not have to fly I sure would not, it is just not worth the hassle. I feel that is going to take another major incident before we have real security at our airports.

—

I could not agree more with the premise of your article. I recently was camping with a pilot for American Airlines. He described how even the pilots think the new rules are a travesty, making passengers more irritated during the flights and doing nothing to enhance aircraft security. Bolt the cockpit doors and give pilots guns, that will give any hijacker incentive to look for other targets.

—

Great article and right on the money. It’s interesting how the media continues to say that airline travel is declining because people are “afraid to fly,” when in reality, people love to fly, they just hate being treated as suspected criminals in the process.

—

Thank you for your article. I am a diabetic and I must carry my supplies syringes) with me and it creates a problem with security that has cost me missing several flights. Now I avoid taking a plane if I can. Americans are not afraid of airplanes, but we are afraid of airports.

Of course, there was one anonymous reader who didn’t like the column:

It seems inconceivable that a professional educator would write an article with so little factual research and so many of the usual cliches of carping critics of security.

Give it up, Norm. I know it’s you. . . .

There’s a political issue here for somebody, folks.

UPDATE: Oh, and several people have written to say that the Barnum quote in my column actually comes from H.L. Mencken. I had a source quoting Barnum, but he’s quoted for lots of things he never said (that’s why I said “supposedly”), so that’s probably right. Oh, and Gary Leff is getting email, too.

To those (well, the plural isn’t obviously appropriate, but. . .) who say I’m wrong about this: show me the evidence that travellers are happy and think this stuff makes ’em safer. I haven’t seen any.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The mail keeps pouring in. Here’s one that sums up the airlines’ business problems:

I am a mid-level manager at a major company. I presently hold Platinum Elite with Continental Airlines and am a life member of American Airlines. I presently have 292,000 miles with Continental and 56,000 with AA. These miles were accumulated in 2001. In 2002, I have 12,000 with Continental and 0 with AA. I only fly when ABSOLUTELY necessary. The hassles and inconveniences are not worth it.

On my last three flights I have been wanded and shoed, my bags were smell tested and I was asked to remove belts, coats and buckles. The final indignity was when the soles of my shoes were bent so far back that the sole broke. The SS officer there said the shoes were WEAK.

Now you know why we have installed 14 additional ISDN lines for Video Conferencing. Those twice monthly business trips to and from the East Coast have been reduced to 2 trips per year. The short hops between LA and San Jose have become family excursions which only take 5 hours to drive. They take 3 hours to fly, not counting the rental car hassles at all major airports. Mr. Mineta and the airlines better come up with a solution to this problem.

As another reader says, the security’s bad enough, but the airlines don’t try to make it up to you in other ways. They seem to think you owe it to them to be their customer.