JOSH CHAFETZ IS BACK, and has a new installment of the immutable laws of Dowd. Don’t miss it.

UPDATE: Okay, I can’t resist — this Fisking is worth quoting:

The showcase line in the column was “We used to worry about a military coup against civilian authority. Now we worry about a civilian coup against military authority.” Maureen was very proud of this line. The NYT online even used it as the tag line for her column. But, um, what the hell does it mean? First, I hate to bring up a pesky little thing like the Constitution — especially when dealing with a legal eagle like Dowd — but Article II, section 2 does say, “The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.” In other words, the military is meant to be under civilian control. The idea of a civilian coup against military authority is completely incoherent in a democratic state.

Like a lot of Dowd’s columns.

JIM DUNNIGAN HAS A COLUMN on the reasons, good and bad, why people fear invading Iraq. Here’s my favorite from among the “bad” reasons:

There are also unspoken reasons why Iraq’s neighbors, and the rest of the world, oppose an invasion. Removing Saddam by military force scares the other leaders of the Arab world because it might (and probably would) work. If such an operation also managed to install a functioning democracy (not a sure thing) it would show the citizens of other Arab states that there is one sure fire way to get rid of the local tyrants and install democracy. Such a development is also anathema to Islamic militants, who want to replace Arab dictators with “Islamic Republics” (run by the clergy.) Most Arabs don’t want this, and the militants know it. Europeans are against the invasion because, if it works, it brings back ugly memories of European colonialism that was supposed to benefit the victims, but didn’t. There’s also some fear that past secret deals with Saddam will come to light. Finally, Europeans hate it when America does something Europeans either didn’t think of, lacked the will to try or the gumption to make it work.

Read the whole thing.

HOWARD BASHMAN ARGUES IN SLATE that the Supreme Court shouldn’t follow polls. He’s right, of course.

But there’s more to it than that. As I argued in a (probably over-sophisticated) article in the Columbia Law Review entitled “Chaos and the Court” some years ago, one of the virtues of the Court, entirely apart from whether it gets things right on the merits, is that its institutional structure keeps it running on different political cycles than the rest of the government. If the court starts paying attention to polls, we lose that feature, as well as acquiring all the vices that go with poll-following on the merits.

THE NEW YORK TIMES HAS ANOTHER WEBLOG ARTICLE, this one on the value of “organizational” sites that let you find blogs of interest in a particular area. BlogTree and Blogs4God get mentioned, as well as the NYCBloggers.

CNN HAS AN UPDATE on yesterday’s sunburn-mom story. She’s pled not guilty to a misdemeanor, and is home with the kids.

TAPPED weighs in on Josh Marshall’s side in the Great Talking Points Controversy.

STATS UPDATE: Jim Lindgren’s Yale Law Journal deconstruction of Michael Bellesiles’ Arming America has now been downloaded 74,584 times since it was posted last Friday afternoon. Still no word from Emory, but expect something soon. If you’re late to the Bellesiles story, you might want to read this piece by Melissa Seckora, along with this piece by Kimberly Strassel.

The great public interest in the case is shown by how many times Lindgren’s piece has been downloaded. (Law review articles aren’t what you’d call sexy, in general.) By way of contrast, the piece that Professor Brannon Denning and I wrote on the Miller case has been downloaded 1113 times, and the piece of mine on jury nullification has been downloaded 2660 times; the piece on how Robert Bork gets originalism all wrong has been downloaded 1123 times, despite being on the server now for nearly a month.

Ordinarily, these would be impressive numbers (most law reviews don’t have circulations that high!), but the huge number of times Lindgren’s piece has been downloaded indicates a degree of public interest that may be unparalleled for a law review article. I’m certain that this is more downloads than any law review article hosted on the Social Science Research Network site has ever gotten (I think the record there is something like 27,000 — and over a period of several years).

Somebody ought to give Lindgren a book contract.

NORM MINETA’S WORST NIGHTMARE: The FoxNews column is officially up. I’m going running. Back later.

MICKEY KAUS REPORTS that the New York Times is fact-checking The New York Times. Hey, maybe the blogosphere is having an impact! And scroll down to see Kaus do actual reporting!

INTERESTING THEORY about the seizure of the Iraqi Embassy in Berlin.

UPDATE: Here’s another special-ops theory from Hesiod Theogeny.

Both theories are plausible, and both are probably wrong in the details. Sitting in my perch in the blogosphere and watching the goings-on in the world, I’m convinced that there are a lot of deceptions underway. But I don’t — and can’t — know enough to know the truth about them. And if I did, I wouldn’t say. But Gary Leff has the mother of all disinformation theories on his page. Chortle.

IN FEBRUARY OF 2001, Dave Kopel warned that Zimbabwe was slouching toward genocide. Now they’re worrying about it in Zimbabwe, too.

DEALING WITH BIG MEDIA: Larry Lessig has a suggestion for how to reduce the power of Hollywood and the RIAA over Congress:

Here’s the simplest thing we could do: identify 2 luddite members of Congress — one Republican and one Democrat. Organize and defeat them in November. If Congress saw bad ideas cost seats, they’d begin to do something about their bad ideas.

Doc Searls likes the idea. Dave Winer agrees, and suggests Joe Biden as one. I just wonder how vulnerable Biden is. The ideal candidate is one who is (1) in Hollywood’s pocket; and (2) vulnerable, with a realistic challenger. Any suggestions? Comments are on.

FORGET “FACT-CHECKING” JOHN PILGER’S ASS: It looks like Tim Blair’s got it under round-the-clock, transnational surveillance.

Meanwhile Ken Layne is into electronic espionage against Big Media organizations. Though as is always the case with espionage, the data require careful evaluation.

OLIVER WILLIS emails that Ian Cook has a plan to revolutionize cable TV news coverage. Which, it’s fair to say, needs it. I’m game.

UNILATERALISM: After criticizing the U.S. for not going along with the International Criminal Court, and after blasting “American style” capitalism, the Germans — well, at least a bunch of German companies — are objecting to new U.S. accounting rules that affect them.

NORM MINETA AND THE REVENGE OF THE TWEEZER PEOPLE: It’s not official until tomorrow, but you can read my FoxNews column now. Just don’t tell anyone I tipped you off.

DANIEL TAYLOR, I’m happy to report, is doing better and is looking for a laptop so he can blog from the hospital. Anybody in his neck of the woods (I seem to recall it’s Atlanta, but I can’t find that on the page) have a loaner available?

THE G.O.P. THINKS that N.Z. Bear has a memory problem. At least, they’re sending him “renewal” notices for a party membership he never had. Another cheesy political stunt. (And, if it’s intentional, fraud?) Good thing campaign finance reform will put a stop to that!

Hey, wait. . . .

OKAY, I WAS ONE OF THE FIRST to jump on Ann Coulter’s, um, overheated rhetoric after 9/11. (And scroll up from that post for much, much more). Since then I’ve mostly ignored her. But everyone’s getting upset over this statement:

Then she said: “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.”

I told her to be careful.

“You’re right, after 9/11 I shouldn’t say that,” she said, spotting a cab and grabbing it.

Uh, actually she shouldn’t have said it before 9/11, either. I suppose it’s not meant to be taken any more seriously than the claim in the same interview that Matt Drudge is ” the sexiest man alive,” but still. . . .

Patrick Nielsen Hayden writes that Mickey Kaus shouldn’t give someone who says this sort of thing a permalink on his site, and helpfully uses the example of someone who wants to kill me as the kind of person he wouldn’t link to. (He in fact links to a few people who call me names on a regular basis, but that’s okay: sticks and stones, and all that.)

Having completely lost control of my too-large blogroll (I can’t even keep up with people’s changes of URL), I don’t think I’ll point fingers on that subject. Coulter’s schtick, though, is to say outrageous and provocative things. In a culture of political correctness that’s a virtue of sorts in itself — and in the early-to-mid-nineties, when that sort of thing was at a peak in the mainstream media, she made it work, as, in a different way, did Maureen Dowd. But those days are long gone, and provocativeness isn’t the same thing now. We’re at war, and, as Ari Fleischer helpfully reminded us, people need to pay attention to what they say.

ACCORDING TO OPENSECRETS.ORG, 78% of Cynthia McKinney’s money came from out of state, versus 3% for Denise Majette.

So if “the jews” cost her the election, they were Georgia jews.

UPDATE: Max Sawicky emails that the numbers are out of date, and he’s right. There’s more on his blog.

Aside: This isn’t OpenSecrets’ fault, since they don’t collect the data — but I don’t see why, if Amazon can track book sales on an hourly basis, we couldn’t have this kind of data available just as quickly. The answer, of course, is that we could — but that it’s not in the lawmakers’ interest to make that easy for us.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Frank Natoli sends this link for more information on Majette, and this link for more information on McKinney. But though it shows a lot more money (because it’s more recent) I can’t find an in-state, out-of-state breakdown.

STRATEGYPAGE HAS SOME INTERESTING OBSERVATIONS about where Delta Force is heading. (Thanks to reader Trent Telenko for pointing this out).

THE NEW YORK CITY COUNCIL, ACCORDING TO THIS REPORT, wants the Palestinian Authority booted from the UN, where it has semi-official status:

The New York City Council overwhelmingly approved a resolution last week to ask the Bush administration and the UN to close the Palestinian mission to the United Nations in Manhattan. During discussions concerning the resolution prior to the vote, Council members made it clear that they considered the Palestinian Authority a terrorist entity. A large group of Council members had just returned from a three-day fact finding mission to Israel sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) and the UJA. During the trip, they saw first hand the effects of terror on the Israeli people.

The resolution condemns all murderous acts against civilians, recognizing that the Israeli people have been attacked over 13,000 times in the last two years, with one of the latest atrocities occuring at Hebrew University in Jerusalem where victms included five American citizens.

It also calls on President Bush to “condemn the Palestinian Authority support of terrorists and harboring of terrorists.” It calls upon the president and the United Nations “to work together to seek the closure of the United Nations Mission of the PA in the City of New York.”

It’s nice that somebody’s figured it out.

AFTER WEEKS OF TAKING SNARKY SHOTS at Stephen Carter’s novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park, Tim Noah has finally read it. And he says it’s good.

Noah’s still after Carter over his non-attendance at some meetings of the Kass Council on bioethics, though. Maybe I’m prejudiced because Carter’s one of my old law profs (though I suppose that could cut both ways. . .) but I think this is, and has been, a bum rap. Carter’s non-attendance, I think, just shows that he’s a smart guy: Smart enough, at least, to figure out that the whole thing was a sham that wasn’t going to affect Administration policy anyway.

MCKINNEY UPDATE: It wasn’t just the Jews — now the Indians are taking credit, too.

Jews, bloggers, Indians. Even Libertarians are taking credit. Success has a thousand fathers.

MARY ROBINSON explains her human rights philosophy in the Tehran Times.