VANESSA LEGGETT UPDATE: Lloyd Grove reports on the multiplicity of awards she’s won for her ordeal. As I wrote in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks back, this case makes the FBI and the Justice Department look really bad. But then, that’s been happening a lot, hasn’t it?

WIRELESS BLOGGING: I’m on the laptop in the Student Center, across the street from the Law School. It’s deserted (summer school starts next week), but there’s Starbucks and a comfy chair. The University finally got the wireless network set up so that it would work with Windows XP (don’t ask). I’m delighted to have the mobility.

TURNAROUND in the Nuremburg files case. The 9th Circuit, sitting en banc held that the websites were “true threats” and not protected by the First Amendment. I’d be inclined to rule the other way, but on the facts this is a close case. Eugene Volokh has more on this. He says that it should have gone the other way, too, and says that the threats here weren’t any worse than those permitted by the Supreme Court in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware. That’s probably true, but this isn’t an easy case. I think it’s likely bound for the Supremes.

UPDATE: Eugene now has a much longer post that makes a pretty persuasive case that Claiborne Hardware should control here.

SFSU UPDATE: Best of the Web has some additional information about goings-on at SFSU. About the quality of the administration’s response it writes:

Political correctness is such an old story as to be a cliché, but perhaps some sort of awakening is under way at SFSU. Will Corrigan be true to his word and deal harshly with his campus’s anti-Semitic thugs? The world is watching.

Indeed it is.

AN ORGY OF GRANDSTANDING AND BLOVIATION: That’s Ron Bailey’s evaluation of yesterday’s Congressional hearings on cloning. Meanwhile this analysis of literary and (of course) Star Wars metaphors in the cloning debate suggests that public discourse has been taken over by the Dark Side. And here Chris Mooney looks at the Star Wars / Lord of the Rings worldview and its roots in Luddism.

ATTY GEN. ASHCROFT isn’t flying commercial, for what are described as “security reasons.” And given the (putative) role of Justice in fighting terrorism, and Ashcroft’s own Pim-Fortuyn-like demonization in the press, maybe that makes sense.

On the other hand, I’d prefer if the guys who subject us to all that lousy and pointless security rigamarole at airports had to go through it themselves. Yeah, I know, you may say I’m a dreamer. But I’m not the only one. . . .

TAPPED leads the charge against political correctness at Berkeley and at the University of South Carolina.

CREATIVE COMMONS seems to be off the ground.

MELANA VICKERS delivers a near-Fisking to supporters of the Army’s “Crusader” vehicle.

EVE KAYDEN writes on unpopular opinions. I’m not surprised at her experience. While political correctness is real, it’s not as prevalent as people might think: it’s just that the extent to which people disagree is masked by preference falsification, which is of course encouraged by self-appointed thought police. That’s breaking down now, partly because the campus left has so thoroughly discredited itself over the past decade, partly because it’s just gotten, well, dull.

THE FEELING OF POWER: Sasha Volokh has a great post. If I weren’t figuring out grades, I’d like it even more.

SFSU UPDATE: Bay Area denizen Richard Bennett has some observations and links.

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER GRAY DAVIS SCANDAL. This one involves the California prison guards’ union, about as us unsavory a political influence as you’re likely to find. I believe they’re big supporters of “three strikes” laws, as you might imagine. Read this L.A. Times piece, too: “Shameless Governor Is a Compulsive Money-Grubber.”

TONY ADRAGNA writes on Cuba, Carter and the Farm Bill. And he has footnotes.

Footnotes. Meanwhile Walter Russell Mead says that Carter’s visit to Cuba was a major blow for freedom.

SFSU UPDATE: Here’s an editorial in the Washington Times.

BAD NEWS for the Chinese economy, reports Brink Lindsey.

BRENDAN O’NEILL REPORTS that it’s a Fukuyama-fest in Britain. Somehow, I’m not surprised.

READER GEORGE SPENCER says that you can’t fix Rolling Stone because it was never that cool anyway:

By coincidence, a few days I dug out some elderly crumbling copies of RS from the late 1960s and early 1970s. In their own dope-y way (pun intended), they’re just as rubbishy as Maxim. If you’re in the narrow demographic/psychographic audience that RS wants to attract, you think it’s cool. If you’re not in that group, RS is uncool. Advertisers would like our 40-something age group to instead read My Generation magazine, a magazine that publishes 1975 era content for mature adults. It’s published by something called the AARP. A recent issue ran a feature on the late Ken Kesey in which he bragged about dropping acid every Easter and going to church with his mother. Hmmm…maybe I’ll stick with the Wall Street Journal.

What? Next you’ll be saying we should make our own coolness instead of getting it from a magazine!

OUBAI SHAHBANDAR says that Bush should get tough on illegal immigrants.

PUNDITREVIEW is calling it “PhotoGate.” Enough “gates” already.