KNOXTHRILLS: The local alt-weekly looks back on the 1982 World’s Fair (which I, then in college, remember as one big party) and remembers it as . . . one big party. I don’t know how it was for the tourists, but for those of us who worked there, it was an eatin’ & drinkin’ & miscegenatin’ good time!

PLUS: Knoxville — proto-birthplace of The New York Times!

THE AHA! GANG: Some people might find emails pointing out mistakes annoying. Not me! The post below briefly said that Rall had voted for Le Pen, something I misread because of his reference to voting for a right-winger. I fixed it in (literally) less than a minute — but over a dozen emails came in pointing out the mistake.

It makes it pretty hard to screw up for long, doesn’t it?

TED RALL says he holds French citizenship in addition to U.S. citizenship.

On May 5th, I voted for a right-winger. It was my first time, and with any luck it will be my last. I really didn’t have much choice. Born in the United States of a French parent, I enjoy dual nationality-a status that Jean-Marie Le Pen had promised to eliminate had his National Front seized the presidency of France.

But of course.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

Americans have been racking our brains: Why did almost 20% of the French electorate vote for Le Pen. Now we know. A vote for Le Pen was a vote to strip Ted Rall of his French citizenship. I’ve often said I’ld never vote for Buchanan, but if he adopted this plank of Le Pen’s platform . . . .

No, that couldn’t be it — or Le Pen would have won!

READER PATRICK THOMAS is unhappy with my post on the new Oracle scandal, below:

You comments regarding another Oracle scandal in “Florida” could use tightening up. The “Florida” scandal is, according to the article, a “Miami-Dade” scandal.

Your phrasing conflates Gov. Bush of Florida with Gov. Davis of Califronia, insinuating state procurement payola, and I saw no mention in the article of involvement by the Florida Republican or members of his administration.

He’s right. Sorry, but it just didn’t occur to me that people would read it that way.

VOLOKH-A-RAMA: Not only was he on Talk of the Nation talking about the Second Amendment, but he’s quoted today in The American Prospect talking about the First!

UPDATE: Volokh has a post about his Talk of the Nation appearance. And here’s a link sent by reader Will Middelaer to an audio stream. I don’t have RealPlayer on this computer (it conflicts with some audio software that’s more important to me) so I haven’t listened to it.

ADAM CURRY reports that his Pim Fortuyn-related blogging has been a “powerful experience.” His essay on press coverage of Fortuyn, entitled “The Big Lie” is number one on Daypop. It’s number 2 on Blogdex, but this post on Curry is Number One.

TAPPED IS taking nominations for the best liberal bloggers. I’m nominating Welch and Layne for starters.

EUGENE VOLOKH was just on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. That doesn’t air here, but here’s reader Paul Giovanni’s reaction to the first part:

As I listen to Nine Totenberg on “Talk of the Nation”, holding forth as NPR’s “national legal correspondent” on the Second Amendment, I am reminded of the claim that NPR is not biased 95% of the time. This must be one of the other 5% of the times. Eugene Volokh is coming on now; if he is the Volokh I think he is, maybe there will be some balance.

Meanwhile Charles Murtaugh says he missed the first part, but heard the second part and “Volokh was very good.” I imagine it’ll be online shortly.

UPDATE: Kevin Hurst heard the whole show and has these comments:

I listened to the entire Talk of the Nation broadcast today and Nina Totenberg was typically insufferable. However, the two guests, Eugene Volokh and Akhil Amar of Yale, largely agreed on the salient point of discussion, i.e. “collectivist” vs. “individualist” views of the 2nd Amendment, as I knew they would given their history on the subject. The host, whose name I’ve forgotten couldn’t quite seem to grasp that the meaning of the 2nd Amendment, as written, is pretty clear when understood in the language of the period. Prof. Amar seemed to help to keep him confused. Prof. Volokh was great. Prof. Amar, IMO, got off on some strange tangents and justifications for the 2nd Amendment which seemed to be more about how a liberal can come to terms with a right to bear arms than constitutional history. Listening to the [guest] from the Violence Policy Center squirm and rant made it all worthwhile.

So there you have it.

UPDATE: The missing Ward Connerly poll (see below) is now here.

EDWARD BOYD has a long quantitative post on media bias, with comments from Geoffrey Numberg. And very cool charts.

EYE ON ALGERIA: Still more violence, largely unreported beyond little wire stories like this one. But this paragraph is the big news:

More than 120,000 people have been killed in Algeria’s Islamic insurgency, which erupted in 1992 when the army canceled elections that a fundamentalist party was poised to win.

Amazingly, this may be true — at least I found this story saying that it’s more than 100,000, and this 1999 report saying that it was between 65-100,000. Note that as of July, 2001 the estimated Algerian population was just under 32 million. Proportionally, then, we’re talking about the equivalent of nearly a million deaths in a country the size of the United States.

ANOTHER ORACLE SCANDAL, this time in Florida. Question: is this how Oracle does business, or is this how everyone does business?

UPDATE: Reader Charles Austin writes: “Unfortunately, it’s pretty much how a lot — not all — but a lot of business gets done at this level. It is a powerful rationale for limiting the power of government. Remember Lord Acton’s famous dictum about power corrupting.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: To clarify, it’s a Miami-Dade scandal, not really a Florida scandal.

IS NORTH KOREA NEARING COLLAPSE? We’ve got credible reports of mass starvation. Now more, and more desperate, people are trying for asylum in foreign consulates. I don’t know if North Korea is near collapse, though it wouldn’t surprise me. But if it does collapse in the near future, I predict that reports of the horrors going on there will bring a lot of discredit on the constructive-engagement policies of Kim Dae Jung.

UPDATE: Zach Barbera noted last month that North Koreans were trying to escape to Mongolia and asked just how bad things had to be for people to do that.

JOHN DERBYSHIRE, suprisingly, doesn’t care about the palestinians.

HERE’S NEWS that’s both encouraging and discouraging:

A suspect in an alleged scheme to obtain fraudulent student visas had flight manuals, a drawing of a plane striking one of the World Trade Center towers and a date book with a lone entry: Sept. 11, according to court documents.

The Virginian-Pilot obtained the documents that were used to justify the arrests of five suspects in the Norfolk area Tuesday. They were among more than 58 people arrested in 13 states on Tuesday.

Encouraging: this guy is in custody. Discouraging: he wasn’t in custody until this week.

IRAQ, AL QAEDA & OKLAHOMA CITY: A reader writes:

Regarding the apparent Iraqi link to the OKC bombing, it always seemed to This Observer very odd that Timothy McVeigh, who was sufficiently capable and with-it to put together a devastating explosive in a Ryder truck, would then morph into such an utter numbskull that he would flee the scene in a car with no license plates. From this flow two possibilities and only two, both pointing to Iraqi involvement: 1) He was in fact a total moron and had little to do with implementing the attack; 2) He was a designated fall-guy and drove without license plates because it was his *mission* to get himself arrested and charged with the attack. And the Clinton Administration, for political advantage, and the FBI, from bureaucratic inertia, were entirely complicit in this imposture.

Well, terrorists do make dumb mistakes — I seem to recall some Palestinians who blew themselves up transporting a bomb because they forgot to allow for Daylight Savings Time or some such. But there are many loose ends and unanswered questions about the Oklahoma City bombing, and even a lot of law enforcement people who aren’t conspiracists have misgivings.

On the other hand, Howard Owens agrees with Josh Marshall that there’s not enough evidence to demonstrate an Iraqi connection to 9/11.

UPDATE: An alert reader sends this link to the Palestinian bomber story, which is pretty much as I remember it. And reader Mike Walsh notes:

Well, the first WTC bombers actually went back to get their deposit on the rental van! Also, if McVeigh was the “designated Fall guy, what possible motive could he have for going through with it? If he was wiling to really die for his cause, he would have lit the fuse and then just turned up the radio and sat there. He also served in the Gulf War, and I have not heard of anybody in that conflict developing any great love for the Iraqis.

GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS AT ABC’S THE NOTE: First, the good news. At long last, The Note actually links to the stuff it mentions! Welcome to the Web, guys!

The bad news: today’s Note uses the term “hide the salami” to describe some legislative maneuvering. Um, well, in a way that’s an appropriate term for most legislative maneuvering (at least in terms of what they’re doing to us), but usually we say “hide the ball,” as the term “hide the salami” has somewhat different connotations.

UPDATE: An email points out that The Note is a Disney publication. Hey, there might be kids reading that post on trade policy!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Dale Betterton writes: “InstaPundit gets results! ‘The Note’ has now changed ‘hide the salami’ to ‘hide the ball.'” So where’s my Boeing?

ANOTHER GRAY DAVIS SCANDAL seems to be brewing, this one over “A company that won approval of a $453 million contract in 2000 to help California manage welfare cases [that] gave $50,000 to Gov. Gray Davis’ campaign within a day of hiring one of the governor’s top fund-raisers as a lobbyist.” The company is Accenture, formerly known as Andersen Consulting.

Interestingly, I noticed that Accenture’s website has absolutely no mention of its history as part of the Andersen empire. I wondered if this was Enron-related, but I called Roxanne Taylor in their media office and she told me that the arbitration decision that severed the relationship between Andersen’s accounting and consulting arms required Accenture to remove all references to Andersen. Still, it’s an interesting historical connection under the circumstances.

BOY, YOU LEAVE THOSE GUYS UNSUPERVISED FOR A MINUTE. . . . I took a couple of hours off to go see my daughter’s elementary school spring program (she looked very cute, twirling red-white-and-blue streamers and singing You’re a Grand Old Flag) and when I get back I find that Jonah Goldberg thinks I’m complaining about Mickey Kaus’s move to Slate. Huh? I’m fine with it. My labeling it the “Great Kausfiles Sellout” was entirely in mockery of those who I figured would seriously accuse him of selling out. Yet another case where what I thought was obvious tongue-in-cheekery wasn’t. Just proves that what one of my colleagues says about teaching applies everywhere else: “It’s impossible to be too obvious.”

No Boeing for you, Slim-Jim boy!

KAUSFILES ENVY: Reader Tom Carroll wants me to emulate Mickey:

Please sell out. . . I’m not sure that the voluntary contributions you get
are enough to keep you interested in the daily blogospheric grind. Please, opt for the Boeing.

Well, I do this because it’s fun, and I don’t want it to turn into work. If it stops being fun, I want to follow the lead of the Sarge and quit. Of course, I hope he’ll come back in a few weeks, as he’s done before: tanned, rested, and ready. (And thicker-skinned about jerky email). But a lot of the fun of the blog world is that it’s fun. There are a lot of people (nearly all of them people who earn their primary incomes from writing) who are really concerned about developing a viable economic model for blogging. More power to ’em, and if the Boeing is offered, I’ll give it serious consideration. But that’s not really what it’s all about for me.

Hmm. “Take the Boeing.” That’s kind of a nice term for blogger-affiliation with major media. As in, “I hear Postrel’s taken the Boeing.” “Yeah, VodkaPundit, too.” “After Kaus and Blair, I figured there’d be a lot of that.”

JAMES LILEKS discusses the U.N. through the prism of web design:

Point number one: clever webmasters fix it so you don’t have to type “www” to call up a site. “un.org” ought to work. Of course, it doesn’t.

Two: the homepage title for the UN is: “it’s your world.” Really. There is a link to read the page in Chinese. There is no link to read it in Tibetan. For those in Tibet, we paraphrase a Rat Pack quote: it’s the Party’s world. You’re just living in it.

ANDREW SULLIVAN and Virginia Postrel both offer their thoughts on the earthshaking Kausfiles acquisition.

How much money is Kaus getting? I don’t know, but he offered to “send the Boeing” for me the next time I travel to L.A. . . . .

Here at InstaPundit, despite all the war profiteering, I can barely keep up my ratty old Gulfstream.

UPDATE: Now Kaus is saying he’s not getting that much money. But rumor has it that Bill Gates’ accountants were seen looking worried yesterday, and muttering something about “that damned money-grubbing blogger.”

WILLIAM SAFIRE WONDERS why the CIA is trying to discredit the story that Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence officials in the Czech Republic — and why some in the press are playing along.

Meanwhile, in the worrisome-if-true category, this story reports some troubling overlaps between loose ends in the Oklahoma City bombing case and the 9/11 hijackers.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall says Safire is wrong.

BE SURE YOU DON’T MISS this InstaPundit Exclusive^TM on the Great Kausfiles Sellout! (Scroll down).

RON ROSENBAUM WRITES that the idiocy of some “pro-peace” advocates (he means Amy Wilentz in particular, though he doesn’t use her name) shows that the American Left is in crisis because of its inability to respond to murderers and thugs — from Yasser Arafat to Pol Pot — who mouth a few catchphrases about oppression in the process of their murder and thuggery.

As someone who has long considered himself a liberal, I think what’s going on here has something to do with the deep denial—the displaced fearfulness—the left has about any discussion of the Holocaust, because it might inevitably bring up the one thing the left is too frightened to face: Stalin’s Holocaust, the mass murders that killed more people than Hitler. The mass murders committed by people like Mao and Pol Pot who mouthed their commitment to “peace” and “social justice” while slaughtering millions in the name of leftist ideals.

Yes, that’s been the crazy aunt in the Left’s attic for over 60 years, and the refusal to deal with it has taken a terrible toll on the Left’s intellectual integrity and moral legitimacy. The pathetic state of today’s “peace movement” indicates just how far that degeneration has gone.