ALL RIGHT, I’M GOING TO BED, but I’ll leave you with this photo of Heather Havrilesky, from the L.A. Weekly.

EVEN MORE ON THE “HARKIN SCANDAL” — I still don’t see why Democrats thought this was going to be bad for Bush . . . .

DIPNUT has some observations on proportional response.

OKAY, I FEEL STUPID linking to Lileks this late at night. I mean, he’ll have another one in the morning, and it’ll be good, too. But I just got to this one, and it’s worth linking to.

NOW IF I discovered a government disinformation campaign that was vital to the war effort, I wouldn’t write about it on my blog. And since I’ve linked to this account, you can be assured there’s nothing to it. Nothing at all. It’s totally bogus. No factual basis whatsoever. Move along, now, nothing to see here.

MARTIN DEVON DEMONSTRATES that a proper Fisking doesn’t require name-calling.

“IF SADDAM SNEEZES, THE DEMOCRATS WILL GET PNEUMONIA:” Dick Morris says that Gore’s speech was a dreadful political mistake.

Only in the past week have Democratic Party leaders come to grasp the magnitude of their error in challenging Bush on Iraq so close to the fall midterm elections. As the tracking polls have come in during the past 10 days, party leaders have realized that they have allowed Bush to change the subject from the economy and corporate greed to Iraq, with potentially lethal consequences for them in the congressional elections. But Gore didn’t get the message.

So was Daschle’s tantrum a mistake, too — or part of a recovery effort? My guess is that it was meant to be the latter, but will turn out to be the former. (Via Joanne Jacobs).

UPDATE: Here’s something suggesting that Morris is righter than he knows. Er, if that’s possible with him.

LIFE ON MARS? Or life from Mars?

BEN FISCHER has been checking Ted Rall’s references and offers the first installment of a series with the results.

STUART BUCK HAS ADVICE for judicial nominees. I think they should follow it. The Bush Administration should nominate a couple of “kamikaze nominees” who would publicly savage the Judiciary Committee for not having hearings then, if asked nasty questions at the hearings, respond sarcastically and aggressively. Dollars to donuts, the Senators would fold. And if they didn’t, well, at least someone would have some fun.

Perhaps Stephen Green would make a good nominee.

THE NEW REPUBLIC ON GORE’S SPEECH: Thanks to the people who emailed me the text. I still can’t get through, so I’m posting a fairly long excerpt:

In the 1980s and 1990s, Al Gore consistently battled the irresponsibility and incoherence on foreign affairs that plagued the Democratic Party. And it was partly out of admiration for that difficult and principled work that this magazine twice endorsed him for president. Unfortunately, that Al Gore didn’t show up at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on Monday. Instead, the former vice president’s speech almost perfectly encapsulated the evasions that have characterized the Democratic Party’s response to President Bush’s proposed war in Iraq. In typical Democratic style, Gore didn’t say he opposed the war. In fact, he endorsed the goal of regime change–before presenting a series of qualifications that would likely make that goal impossible.

First, Gore said that war with Iraq would undermine America’s primary mission: fighting terrorism. This mission, he explained, requires ongoing international cooperation. And he suggested that “our ability to secure this kind of cooperation can be severely damaged by unilateral action against Iraq. If the administration has reason to believe otherwise, it ought to share those reasons with the Congress.” But surely Gore also has an obligation to share his reasons for believing that war with Iraq will “severely damage” the war on terrorism. The argument, after all, is not self-evident: Germany, the U.S. ally most vocally opposed to attacking Iraq, has simultaneously intensified its assistance in the war on terrorism–signaling that it will take over the international peacekeeping force in Afghanistan. In fact, Gore provides no evidence to support his claim. And thus he fails the very evidentiary standard that he calls on Bush to meet.

Gore’s second complaint concerns the timing of the administration’s push on Iraq. “President George H.W. Bush,” Gore noted approvingly, “purposely waited until after the midterm elections of 1990 to push for a vote. … President George W. Bush, by contrast, is pushing for a vote in this Congress immediately before the election.” But as we argued two weeks ago, it is far better, in a democracy, for legislators to vote on critical issues before an election–so citizens know where they stand when they go to the polls–than to delay such votes until after an election and thus shield legislators from accountability for their views. Gore went on to pronounce “a burden on the shoulders of President Bush to dispel the doubts many have expressed about the role that politics might be playing in the calculations of some in the administration,” before adding, “I have not raised those doubts, but many have.” But, of course, that is exactly what Gore was doing. And he should have taken responsibility for raising those doubts himself.

Gore’s final critique of the administration’s preparations for war is that they are proceeding without sufficient regard to international opinion. “[I]n the immediate aftermath of September Eleventh,” Gore said, “we had an enormous reservoir of goodwill and sympathy and shared resolve all over the world. That has been squandered in a year’s time and replaced with great anxiety all around the world, not primarily about what the terrorist networks are going to do but about what we’re going to do.” But this ignores the fact that there is not now, nor will there likely be in the foreseeable future, broad international support for regime change in Baghdad. The two honest ways to resolve this problem are to privilege regime change above international consensus–while trying, as the Bush administration has, to pressure and cajole as many allies as possible to go along–or to forego regime change in the name of solidarity without our allies. Instead, Gore swore fealty to both regime change and international consensus, while refusing to acknowledge the conflict between the two. The closest he came was a suggestion that “if the [Security] Council will not provide such language [authorizing force], then other choices remain open.” But would Gore support those “other choices,” i.e., war? From his San Francisco

speech, you wouldn’t know.

Yes, it’s this unwillingness to take a position — and too-obvious positioning to blame Bush if things go wrong — that renders Gore, and many other Democrats (with the exception of some, like Zell Miller, John Edwards, and Joe Lieberman) so embarrassingly inadequate to the debate. It’s opportunism, pure and simple. And it’s the transparent and self-defeating opportunism of someone who has memorized the rulebook, but who doesn’t understand the game.

GPS JAMMING: Sgt. Stryker’s addresses the issue. Here’s the first post on the subject, and here’s the followup. Short answer: not as big a worry as it initially appears.

“WEAK AND VAGUE” — Virginia Postrel parses Al Gore’s speech.

PORPHYROGENITUS thinks that military action is coming sooner, rather than later.

I’VE BEEN TRYING TO READ the editorial in The New Republic on Gore’s speech, which I gather isn’t very flattering. But their servers appear unequal to handling a link from Drudge, because I can’t get through. You might try ’em later; I will.

BELLESILES UPDATE: Here’s an article from History News Network analyzing the likely outcome of the Bellesiles investigation in light of Emory’s internal rules for discipline. The short version: (quoting an anonymous Emory professor) “Bellesiles is toast.” A whitewash is seen as unlikely:

If the Investigative Committee or Emory should bring forth a slap-on-the-wrist decision which many perceive to be a whitewash, Emory will reap a whirlwind. If it thinks it will rid itself of the Bellesiles controversy by so doing, the probable response by the press, Emory alumni, Emory students, as well as members of Emory’s own History faculty would doubtless show that such an approach was sadly misguided.

I agree. There was a point at which a whitewash might have saved Emory bad publicity (though in light of the formidable evidence against Bellesiles, that’s debatable) but regardless, we’re well past that point now.

WHY BRITAIN NEEDS MORE LIBERAL FIREARMS LAWS:

They began to push me and shout obscenities. ‘Come with us,’ they kept saying, menacingly.

I stood my ground and kept begging them to go away. I wished I had a man with me or that someone might stop, but no one did. Enraged by my reaction, they began to pull at my clothes. ‘What have you got there?’ I kept a firm grip on my handbag. ‘Only money for a taxi,’ I said, barely able to speak in my mounting state of panic. Then they noticed a pair of silver and diamanté earrings which I had forgotten to remove. ‘We’ll take those, then,’ they said and yanked them off my ears. Luckily they were clip-ons, so my lobes suffered no real damage. But at this point I began to run. . . .

Meanwhile I am still nervous and emotional. I was lucky, though. It could have been a lot worse. But I fear for those young girls who go out wearing revealing dresses because they are told it’s the fashion. It isn’t worth it. Had my shirt showed my bosom, I might have been raped. So I say to mothers, London is dangerous, everywhere. Don’t let your daughters go out at night in mini-skirts or tops slashed to the stomach. Don’t let them come home alone. Or they might not come home at all.

It’s not the girls who shouldn’t be coming home from an encounter like this.

SALON HAS A LENGTHY TREATMENT of the Bell Labs scandal that’s well worth reading.

I think that it’s important to get to the bottom of this, and for people in the field to realize that peer review isn’t a panacea, and certainly isn’t a reason to suspend their own skepticism. On the other hand, I think that the history of responses to science fraud suggests that efforts to create a “cure” may be worse than the disease. Here’s a law review article (based on a chapter in the ethics book I coauthored with Peter W. Morgan, The Appearance of Impropriety) that illustrates that problem. It’s reasonably short, by law review standards.

HERE’S A CHATBOARD on which Ted Rall is defending his Afghanistan positions against a variety of critics — and defending Rush Limbaugh along the way! Well, sort of.

HESIOD THEOGENY seems to be catching on to the possibility that there’s a deeper game in progress.

LAW PROFESSOR PETER TILLERS is unimpressed by Jack Balkin’s oped calling George W. Bush the most dangerous man in the world:

I recognize that the thin air at Yale may prevent people there from giving a plausible answer to this last question. Yale Law professors are not expected to have a great deal of common sense. They are meant to think. Indeed, we expect Yale Law professors to think and utter provocative thoughts. Professor Balkin, I readily admit, has performed the last-mentioned service.

Yes. As I wrote a while back, academics tend to set too much store in being clever and provocative. This tends to produce foolish statements when they address non-academic subjects.

CAN SADDAM JAM J-DAMS? Joe Katzman is onto a disturbing possibility. Can GPS encryption solve this problem?

UPDATE: According to this probably-reliable account, if GPS is jammed it just reduces the accuracy somewhat. (Thanks to Jay Manifold for emailing the link.)

BELLESILES UPDATE: The Chronicle of Higher Education has more on the doings at Emory. The story requires a subscription, but here’s an excerpt:

“Obviously the report is highly negative,” said Jerome Sternstein, a professor emeritus of history at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. Mr. Bellesiles “is anxious to keep [the report] under wraps,” he said. “If the report said that the charges of fraud were unfounded, they would have released it immediately, and he would have insisted that they do so.”

Emory announced in April that it would release the report when the investigation, by an independent committee of distinguished scholars, was completed. But the report remains confidential, even though the investigation was finished in July. The university now says it will release the results at the end of the appeals process, which Provost Hunter told the student newspaper would be “soon.”

Along with other members of the university’s faculty, David J. Garrow, a law professor, reiterated the assumption that the report finds fault with Mr. Bellesiles’s research. He also said that many university faculty members are disappointed by Mr. Bellesiles and how he handled the accusations.

“If there is faculty support for him on campus, I am unaware of it,” said Mr. Garrow. “My personal impression is that whatever the scale or scope of the documentary problems in the book, his ever-changing and seemingly inconsistent responses magnified the scope of the problem several-fold.”

Another faculty member, who declined to be identified, said that “it’s a mystery as to why he handled this controversy in such an abysmal way.”

It’s been interesting to see the initial circle-the-wagons support for Bellesiles melt away. The initial impulse was understandable (if, on the part of historians, marked by a certain unjustified snobbishness toward legal academics). Everybody makes mistakes, any work of scholarship — especially one at book-length — contains errors, and anyone can imagine someone picking over his/her record to find those errors and combining them into an unfair assault.

But while that could happen to anyone, it isn’t what happened to Bellesiles. And now that people have recognized that fact, his support has vanished. I think the likelihood that Emory will paper this over is now virtually nil.

Some people have been comparing the Bellesiles case to this Bell Labs fraud case (which incidentally was first reported by a blogger — not me, as I got email on it but didn’t know if I could trust the source). But the Bell Labs investigation actually did go on for a while, and Bell Labs researchers don’t have tenure.

UPDATE: Here’a a story from the Daily Princetonian about an assistant professor of physics at Princeton who was instrumental in uncovering the Bell Labs fraud.

That’s an impressive thing to do, and especially gutsy in someone so junior. The conventional wisdom is that fraud sometimes goes unnoticed because it’s not career-enhancing for academics to debunk other academics’ work. That’s true, I think — you only have to look at NWU Law Professor James Lindgren, who has taken a fair amount of abuse for his work in uncovering Bellesiles’ fabrications, to see that in action. (And who has invested time and energy in that work instead of in the scholarship he otherwise would have been working on).

I hope that the same thing won’t happen here. While people tut-tut about the problem in general, they’re still quick to look askance at those who actually uncover fraud. Yet when fraud is left unaddressed, the reputation of academia suffers.

O’REILLY VS. LUDACRIS: Greg Beato is on the story.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS lays out the case for war.