TOTAL BANDWIDTH FOR OCTOBER: 261.45 gigs. The server, however, is handling it just fine. I’ve been very happy with HostingMatters. They also have a stripped-down, but still very generous and reasonably priced, service aimed specifically at blog-hosting. Visit Bloggerzone if that interests you.

APPARENTLY some people are delinking Michele of A Small Victory because they’re uncomfortable with bellicose women. So go visit her site and let her know that not everyone feels that way. Then view StacyTabb’s comments on the subject.

UPDATE: Heh. There’s the spirit.

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH HAS FINALLY come out with the amazing notion that suicide bombings are wrong. Congratulations. Here’s the link to the report.

DANIEL TAYLOR on the “sniper subculture:”

Reminds me of my days working retail bookselling. We carried a handful of those stupid “how to be a ninja” books, but to my knowledge we never actually sold one. They kept getting shoplifted. I now recognize I should have been blaming the “ninja subculture” instead of the pimply-faced adolescent guys that appeared to be responsible.

This has numerous applications, now that I think about it. Now, instead of blaming the Violence Policy Center for rampant dishonesty, I’ll blame the “opportunistic nonprofit-fundraising subculture.”

But they’ve still got the item citing Bellesiles on their website:

Early America was vastly different from the handgun-happy images one sees on television, in movies, and in the pages of gun magazines. Serious historians have documented that early Americans had little interest in guns. Until the mid-1800s, owning a gun was surprisingly uncommon. Those who owned firearms almost always owned long guns.

Historian Michael Bellesiles, for example, examined more than a thousand probate records from northern New England and Pennsylvania filed from 1765 to 1790. He found that only 14 percent of household inventories included firearms–and more than half of these were inoperable.22 Colonial settlers got meat mostly from domesticated animals like cows and pigs. When they wanted wild game, they bought it from native Americans or professional hunters, most of whom trapped their prey.23 Prior to 1850, at most only a tenth of the nation’s population individually owned guns of any kind.24

Sure, it’s only been a week since he resigned in disgrace. I blame the subculture of — oh, hell, never mind.

DUELLING PREDICTIONS: Daniel Drezner and Jacob T. Levy have posted their predictions for next week’s elections.

THE WICKED FLEE WHEN NO MAN PURSUETH: On BlogCritics, Eric Olsen put up a post about a Fox show on arranged marriages and his comments filled up with angry blasts from outraged defenders of Islam. He replies here.

MISHA performs another Imperial Misting, directed at the Not In Our Name crowd.

Gore Vidal, of course, will hate the constant Caligula appearances.

RACHEL LUCAS delivers yet another well-deserved Fisking to Michael Moore. I think that she should show up unannounced with a video camera and deliver it face-to-face.

He wouldn’t mind something like that, would he?

UPDATE: Here’s more on the same dumb Moore letter.

MICROSOFT CONSENT DECREE APPROVED with only minor changes. The opinion is here.

A ROMAN-THEMED MAUREEN DOWD PARODY, from (who else?) BitchPundit.

I’VE LARGELY IGNORED THE FUSS OVER THIS DEMOCRATIC AD, but now that Jason Rylander is calling it despicable, I guess I can’t put the fuss down to last-minute election-related hype.

CHRIS MOONEY, formerly the main voice at TAPPED, now has his own weblog, offering Harry Potter-themed observations on spycraft (er, well, sort of), among other things.

UPDATE: Chris Mooney corrects me on the “main voice” line: “Nick Confessore was (and in his case still is) just as instrumental as myself.”

ANDREW BREITBART WRITES on the Winona Ryder trial. He’s not impressed.

“EUROPE ON THE BRINK OF COLLAPSE:” That’s the headline of this article, which observes:

While this battle rages, the Euro-zone economy is going from bad to worse. It was hardly surprising that many missed the devastating one-word summary of the German economy by the country’s equivalent of the CBI last week: “catastrophic”.

From the bottom to the top, but especially at the top, Europe is in a deepening mess. The international economic downturn has contributed to continental woes. But that downturn is not the cause, or the proximate cause, of Europe’s stunning reversal of fortune.

The cause is a self-destruction wrought by a political elite that has wrapped itself in fantastical self-delusion about the superiority of its economic system, the coming ascendancy of the single currency over the dollar, and the tide of wealth and prosperity that would inevitably flow from the relentless pursuit of “ever closer union”. Here, on an epic scale, has been a procession of naked emperors who cannot begin to grasp why the world has stopped applauding.

For the Euro-zone, the applause stopped long ago. In the cacophony that passes for policy coherence there has come an absurd but utterly predictable result: far from the euro providing greater stability and a platform for better performance as its apologists claimed, the economies inside the Euro-zone are now faring worse than those outside.

It sounds like Enron, only with tax money. And, naturally, with less moral outrage.

UPDATE: Chris Bertram emails that he thinks the piece quoted above overstates the problems of Europe in general, but not those of France.

FELLOW TENNESSEE BLOGGER DONALD SENSING has a post on an election issue that I didn’t mention in my post below: the lottery battle. I’m not very interested in that, really. I don’t think that gambling is immoral, though I’m not especially thrilled with the idea of the government being in the gambling business especially on a more-or-less monopolistic basis. And the way the lottery is set up, it won’t actually solve any of the problems that we keep hearing about in terms of state revenue.

LILEKS IS DEEPLY DISAPPOINTED WITH FRITZ MONDALE’S CAMPAIGN. And he’s got reasons. Lots of ’em. And tough questions for Mondale. Lots of ’em.

I wonder if the press will ask Mondale any of those questions in the next few days?

TACITUS HAS A FIRSTHAND ACCOUNT OF AN ANTI-SAUDI RALLY ON CAPITOL HILL, by the families of 9/11 victims. Interesting; I wonder if it’ll get much press.

MORE ON JOHN MUHAMMAD from Jim Henley, including the question of why Muhammad, with his rather, ahem, checkered military record, received an honorable discharge.

TRAFFIC: For October, Extreme Tracker reports 943,166 unique visitors to the main page. SiteMeter reports just shy of 1.6 million for the site as a whole (including archives, etc.). Hope the server doesn’t melt!

HERE’S THE PROGRAM FOR THE YALE LAW SCHOOL CONFERENCE ON WEBLOGS that’s three weeks from today. I’ll be the “keynote” speaker and Mickey Kaus will be the “featured” speaker. Your guess is as good as mine as to what the difference is. Josh Marshall, Jeff Jarvis, John Hiler, and a host of other interesting people will be there, too.

TENNESSEE ELECTIONS: People are asking me what I think. The reason I haven’t posted is that I don’t have really strong opinions or predictions.

The governor’s race, between Phil Bredesen and Van Hilleary, could still go either way. I’ve had dinner with both of them recently, and my impression is that they’re both decent guys. (Interestingly, both stressed their strong Second Amendment positions — there’s just no real support for anti-gun positions in Tennessee nowadays). Bredesen’s ahead in the polls, but not by a lot. The most interesting thing is that the Republican, Van Hilleary, is running commercials calling Bredesen “BredeSundquist” — invoking the name of the state’s wildly unpopular Republican governor, who somehow managed to offend almost everyone with his various stances on the state income tax.

In the Senate race, Alexander is ahead, though the gap is closing. I have some students working for Clement who seem depressed about the race — if there’s secret good news in the polling (which some suggest there may be because Alexander has gone very negative in his ads, which is unusual for someone ahead at this stage of a campaign) they don’t know about it. I haven’t seen people this depressed since the final stages of the 1988 Dukakis campaign.

My local congressman, who voted against the Iraq war resolution, is running more commercials than usual. The Libertarian challenger is on the radio a lot too. Interestingly, their commercials are very similar.

People are predicting a low turnout, but the turnout at the early-voting sites is huge. I don’t know what that means.

So there you are.

BELLESILES UPDATE: Kimberly Strassel has a piece in the Wall Street Journal, calling it a conditional victory for scholarly integrity. That seems about right.

UPDATE: And here is a comment on History News Network debunking Jon Wiener’s Nation account of “unusually large men” shadowing Bellesiles.

For what it’s worth, when I spoke at the Stanford program on the Second Amendment where Bellesiles was the keynoter, there were people passing out leaflets, too. They were, as I recall, distinctly non-threatening.

ANOTHER UPDATE: And here’s a story from the National Post that I found via HNN’s index of media coverage. I hadn’t noticed this page until just now. Here’s an excerpt from the Post story:

From the start, Bellesiles’ assertions were highly implausible. No guns in 18th-century America? Nobody who has looked at an 18th-century painting or read an 18th-century book could believe it. How could such an assertion get past a publisher or the Bancroft prize-givers? We know the answer. They believed it because they wanted to believe. The ideological bias of the modern university can blind academics to the truth as utterly as ever did the theological biases of the past. They could not have been so easily lead astray had they not first shut their eyes.

True enough.

THE BLOGOSPHERE IN ACTION: I have to go to The Volokh Conspiracy to find out what’s going on at my own campus.

The University of Tennessee’s Administration should be ashamed of itself. Not that the fraternity in question has a lot to be proud of. But free speech isn’t only for things that you should be proud of, something that universities certainly seem able to appreciate in many other contexts. As Eugene Volokh writes:

Uh, administrators, sorry to distress you even further, but the First Amendment gives people the right to be uncivil, unharmonious, and not terribly respectful of racial harmony. What’s more, it means that when you sanction people, you are violating the Constitution, and can be and should be sued and held financially liable.

The funny thing is that this very issue — people’s right to wear blackface — has come up before, and has actually led to a U.S. Court of Appeals decision, Iota Xi v. George Mason University (4th Cir., some time in the early 1990s) that made perfectly clear that public universities may not punish students for wearing blackface. But even without the Iota Xi decision, the right First Amendment result would be obvious.

You needn’t be the author of a First Amendment text, like Volokh, to see the principle here. One might almost say you need to be a university administrator to miss it. As I said, the University — and specifically Provost Loren Crabtree and whoever advised him on this — should be ashamed. And such tactics in the name of political correctness make a mockery of claims regarding academic freedom at universities, which, as I’ve said before, are in fact some of the most hostile environments in America where free speech is concerned. I’m embarrassed to see my own institution fall prey to such thinking.

UPDATE: On looking at the story again, this passage leaps out at me:

“We will require the leaders and members of Kappa Sigma to demonstrate a commitment to uphold our expectations for civility, ethnic diversity and racial harmony,” Crabtree said.

This sounds suspiciously like a demand for a loyalty oath, pledging fealty to the University’s positions on “ethnic diversity” and “racial harmony.” That, too, is a violation of the First Amendment.

ANOTHER UPDATE: And people are already making fun of UT for this. Sigh.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Eugene Volokh has another post on the “blackface” issue.

ONE MORE UPDATE: Great. The story’s on Drudge, and Neal Boortz has a link on his program notes page, which means it was on his show today. Presumably, the reason for the University’s response was fear of bad publicity, but the response has so far produced nothing but bad publicity. I wonder if they’ll take the appropriate lesson from that.

A SUICIDE BOMBER’S FATHER has figured something out:

“The Israelis are armed with democracy, knowledge and order,” he said. “We need these weapons. Blowing up 100 buses and restaurants will neither destroy Israel nor bring us victory.”

Yep.

BARNEY FRANK WEIGHS IN on the South Carolina gay-bashing campaign incident:

The comment came during a discussion of which South Carolina candidate — Republican U.S. Rep. Lindsey Graham or Democrat Alex Sanders — had more liberal friends and associates. Sanders noted that one of Graham’s endorsements came from former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is “ultra-liberal.”

“His wife kicked him out and he moved in with two gay men and a Shih Tzu,” Sanders continued. “Is that South Carolina values? I don’t think so.” . . .

U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, an openly gay Democrat from Massachusetts, criticized Sanders in a statement on Thursday.

“Mr. Sanders’ pronouncement that it violates South Carolina values to accept an offer of hospitality from a gay couple is a bigoted comment that reflects poorly on Mr. Sanders, not Rudy Giuliani,” Frank said.

I agree. Unless, of course, Sanders was talking about the Shih Tzu, in which case his comments are entirely understandable.

UPDATE: And here’s something I didn’t know about Paul Wellstone on this subject. It’s of only academic interest now, of course — but the fact that nobody was reporting it tells us something that may be more generally relevant.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Tony Adragna was on this story first. Advantage: Quasipundit!