BELLESILES UPDATE: Here’s a story on the Bellesiles affair from my local paper. There’s a quote from me that’s not very exciting, but the one from Boston University law professor Randy Barnett is pretty good:

“To me, the real story is that in the beginning the professional historians closed ranks behind Bellesiles and savaged the professional and amateur researchers who questioned him, and unless those historians are now willing to step forward and admit they were wrong and the critics were right, they run the risk of turning Bellesiles into the Alger Hiss of the history profession.”

The Alger Hiss of the history profession. Or the Lillian Hellman?

PRESIDENT’S CASE FOR LINKAGE FAILS TO CONVINCE; This isn’t the way I’ve heard it, but. . . .

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

One of the requirements of a healthy party is that it renews itself. You can’t keep running Walter Mondale for everything.

–Walter Mondale, declining to run for the United States Senate seat from Minnesota (1989)

Heh. And check out this new Mondale radio ad.

UPDATE: Bob Kuttner agrees! “The Democrats will soon run out of 70-year-old issues and 70-year-old ex-senators. They had better start generating more Wellstones.”

AUSTIN BAY WRITES THAT Zimbabwe may be near the point of genocide. Naturally the “international community” is doing next to nothing — as it generally does when people warn of a coming genocide.

UPDATE: On Zimbabwe, read this, too. And here’s an InstaPundit post from over a year ago.

SO FAR, THIS is the scariest thing I’ve seen today.

UPDATE: This, on the other hand, was kind of cute, in a scary sort of way.

ANOTHER UPDATE: But this is spooky, in a cute sort of way.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Meanwhile this can only be described as “torment.”

MUHAMMAD AND MALVO have been linked to another shooting, this one in Louisiana:

Washington, Attorney General John Ashcroft said the investigation was continuing into the possibility that other people may be involved or that the two suspects in custody in Maryland have committed more crimes.

“We will proceed deliberatively, cautiously and not jump to any conclusions,” Ashcroft said. “The facts that the evidence will determine the final outcome and we intend to follow the facts wherever they may lead.”

The rifle has now been tied to shootings in four states and the District of Columbia. Earlier Thursday, Alabama authorities said the weapon was linked to the September killing; police are also looking into cases in Washington state, Oregon, California, Arizona, Michigan, Tennessee and Connecticut.

In the Baton Rouge slaying, the victim was shot once in the head by a gunman witnesses described as a young black man who fled into a park.

Muhammad, formerly known as John Allen Williams, grew up in Baton Rouge and still has relatives and friends there, including one of his ex-wives. He visited the area this summer, friends said.

This case just gets more curious.

UPDATE: Here’s more on Muhammad, the grenade attack in the Gulf, and a hidden weapon. I think he’s more than a mere “screwball.”

ANOTHER BOGUS HATE-CRIME REPORT is debunked by Suman Palit.

UPDATE: Read this, too.

THE RUSSIANS ARE GOING TO WRAP THE CHECHEN/ARAB TERRORISTS IN PIGSKIN before burial. Didn’t Pershing do something like this in the Philippines?

(Via LGF).

UPDATE: Apparently, whether Pershing did this or not is undetermined. And Terry Oglesby sends this.

THE NEW REPUBLIC is not very impressed with Fritz Mondale’s speech.

HERE’S A NEW ANTI-WAR GROUP WEBLOG that looks to be an improvement over some earlier efforts — though they’re surprisingly bellicose about North Korea. I hope they’ll feel the same way in, oh, about 18 months. . . .

TERROR RAIDS IN NASHVILLE:

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Agents with a terrorism task force raided an Iraqi immigrant’s home Thursday, and authorities said other searches were being conducted in the city.

No immediate arrests were made, but FBI, Customs and IRS agents spent about three hours at the home of Fadhil Abbas Al-Sahaf, 34. They were seen leaving with boxes, plastic bags, papers, envelopes, FedEx packages and videotapes. A travel trailer in the back yard also was searched.

Douglas Riggin, an FBI agent in charge of the task force, said the moves were not connected to “any terrorist act which might pose a threat to the city.” As for whether the raid was related to terrorist threats elsewhere, he said: “The task force investigated it. Draw your own conclusions.”

You’ll pretty much have to, because this story doesn’t provide much information.

I’VE MENTIONED SOUTH DAKOTA’S PROPOSED CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT ON JURY NULLIFICATION BEFORE, but here’s an article by Stephanie Simon in the Los Angeles Times on the subject. I think that this is the most telling passage:

Opponents, meanwhile, have been afraid to do much public campaigning. Lawyers have debated the amendment at forums across the state—including one here last week at the University of South Dakota law school. They worry that advertising might backfire. Voters tend to be suspicious of attorneys—so they might reason that if the state bar opposes Amendment A, it must be good.

With all due respect to my own profession, this states a serious problem. The article is pretty balanced overall, but omits the single biggest issue in my opinion: people get exercised at the idea of giving a jury unreviewable discretion to let someone go when they’ve violated the law, but police and prosecutors do that all the time. The question is, is there any reason to trust juries less? I haven’t seen anyone address that, much less answer it satisfactorily. And given that the criminal law has become so complex and unpredictable that prosecutors can almost always find something to charge someone with, there’s a lot of unsupervised discretion on that end, too. It only seems fair to give juries authority to police this exercise of prosecutorial discretion, especially as courts are basically unwilling to do so.

The answer the legal establishment gives to charges that prosecutors might misbehave is basically: “trust us.” But they don’t trust juries, and they haven’t given any very persuasive reasons why they’re more trustworthy than juries are. And there are some good institutional reasons to suggest that they’re less so. For more on this, you can read my review of Clay Conrad’s book, here.

HMM. SPEAKING OF CBS, this AP story says that three people protested outside an NRA rally in Tucson featuring Charlton Heston. But the version on the CBS website, which is otherwise the same, raises that number to “a few dozen.”

Wonder what accounts for the difference?

And why are three, or even a few dozen, anti-gun demonstrators more news than hundreds of pro-war Iraqis?

UPDATE: A reader writes to remind me that CBS has trouble with numbers, since a while back it seemed to think that Bush was President back in 1998. Heh. I had forgotten that one.

READER JOAQUIM MACHADO sends this unfortunate headline from CBS Marketwatch: “Pitt Seeks Probe of Himself.”

JACKASS: THE DOCUMENTARY — Matt Labash gives Michael Moore’s latest effort an unequivocal thumbs-down:

It’s a harrowing tale, one which Moore first takes to Dick Clark in an ambush interview (Clark quickly peels away in a minivan, unfortunately missing Moore), and later to NRA president Charlton Heston. Heston, of course, has announced he has symptoms consistent with Alzheimer’s, which is apparent, because when Moore buys a star map and shows up at Heston’s gate unannounced, he lets Moore in for an interview. Starting off slowly, peppering him with chatter about the second amendment, Moore ends up closing in for the kill, asking Heston if he’d apologize for bringing NRA conventions to both Flint and Littleton after their respective shootings. Heston wisely calls it quits, but as he flees his own living room, Moore follows him, hectoring him with a picture of the girl Tamarla Owens’s son shot. “This is her. Please take a look at her, please, this is the girl,” Moore says, before propping the photo against Heston’s house.

It is perhaps the single-most shameful moment ever in a Moore project, which is saying something, since Moore authored an entire chapter on how O.J. Simpson couldn’t have killed his wife (because rich people usually hire lowerlings to do their dirty work). Not only did he ambush a doddering old man who had nothing to do with the shooting, but he related the Owens story in a fashion that was dishonest in nearly every way.

For what Moore didn’t tell us about Tamarla Owens and her family could fill several newspaper and magazine articles, and did. The uncle’s house where Owens left her children was, additionally, a crack house, where guns were often traded for drugs. The gun that the boy stole from a shoebox on a mattress in his uncle’s bedroom had been reported stolen once before. And Owens was hardly a model parent, merely getting squeezed by unfortunate circumstances. According to Time magazine, Owens herself was a drug addict (she denied it). Additionally, reported Newhouse News Service, according to a state Family Independence Agency petition, she admitted holding down her oldest boy so he could be beaten with a belt by two male friends, and she also admitted beating the boy with a belt while sitting on him, after first duct-taping his hands, feet and mouth.

In short, Owens and her clan were to responsible gun ownership what Moore is to responsible journalism. To beat Heston up for her problems is itself an act of violence. It is perhaps understandable why Moore attempted to drop himself from the narrative, and put a less-fortunate type like Owens front-and-center. As he recently told one reporter, he has a sign on his editing-room door that says “when in doubt, cut me out.” The reason he says, is “First of all, I can’t stand the look of myself. Secondly, a little bit of me goes a long way. . . . because it’s just a bit much. That’s how it feels when I watch it.” After watching “Bowling For Columbine,” it’s easy to see how he feels.

Phil Donahue likes it, though.

JOHN HAWKINS has an interview with Michelle Malkin focusing chiefly on immigration issues.

“WE REALLY STRIVE TO SERVE THE COMMUNITY.” This is what I call a full-service campus health facility, and I’m sure Rachael Klein would approve. But where’s the concern for male students here?

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Speaking of which, what is she [Rachael Klein] doing now? I thought for sure she’d be writing for somebody. She must have graduated from college with more dedicated readers than most journalists ever hope to have.

I had an email from her over the summer — she was working somewhere financially related. I hope she doesn’t let her writing career slide, because I think that’s right about her readership.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: Go read this Lileks piece on music. Go ahead — me and Christina Aguilera will still be doing our respective things when you’re done.

HOWARD KURTZ CALLS THE WELLSTONE RALLY A “DEBACLE” and has a roundup of the reactions. Excerpt:

How badly can a political party screw up a memorial service?

Just ask Minnesota’s Democrats.

They staged a public farewell for Paul Wellstone that was so over the top, so blatantly partisan, that Jesse Ventura walked out. . . .

In effect, the service was hijacked in a small-minded way that detracted from the memory of Wellstone.

Yep. It was. And it did.

UPDATE: Capitol Hill Blue says it was all part of a big media plan for this week. Hey, I didn’t say it was a good plan. But since it was reportedly approved by Terry McAuliffe personally, it means that his prospects are even more closely tied to how Democrats do next week.

THIS COLUMN IN THE STRAITS TIMES is pessimistic about whether Indonesia will actually start taking Islamic terrorism seriously. Consider the source, but it’s still a bummer.

BLOG ROUNDUP: Visit Carnival of the Vanities and follow the links.

MY FOXNEWS COLUMN is about nanotechnology. It probably won’t be news to a lot of InstaPundit readers, though it is rather link-rich.

BELLESILES UPDATE: The History News Network has an article arguing that although the Bellesiles affair is, mostly, over, the underlying problem remains:

Unfortunately, it seems that many senior academics still don’t understand that what has happened has happened in some measure to them. They are tainted by this failure to use their antique guild procedures strictly, fairly, and above all, promptly; in this they failed all of us. They don’t seem to grasp how easily it could happen again.

The main obstacle to dealing forthrightly with gross academic misconduct is the reflexive reaction that any disciplinary measure at all will forever destroy academic freedom, which is fully enjoyed only by tenured faculty, by the way. But this defense of academic freedom may simply mask the worship of academic privilege, that is, a remarkably complete freedom from accountability. The exercise of this privilege to commit scholarly fraud — rewarded by prizes, royalties, fellowships — is hard to distinguish from theft by deception. Most fraud, after all, is committed for gain. The long line of Bellesiles’s enablers will not be made to pay. . . .

The editor at Knopf is still in place, doubtless hoping to publish another bombshell soon. There is little cause for rejoicing in this outcome until the system is forced to change. Until then, the moral of this story will remain ‘tell them what they want to hear; lie as much as you dare; cash the checks.’ Doesn’t it sound like the nightly news?

Peer review is supposed to be an adequate protection against fraud, inaccuracy, and other scholarly shortcomings, that being its main reason for existing. There have been studies of how it really works. They do not make encouraging reading. Even if the built-in temptations for reviewers could be taken out of it, the official peer review system can’t possibly work as it needs to within the microscopically subdivided academic research system of today: often there are no true peers to be found. In practice, peer review is a compost that nourishes cronyism, conformism, and other abuses. Bellesiles was reviewed at least twice by Emory: once at hiring, and once for promotion, that time after his 1996 article, a preview of the book to follow, had appeared in a peer-reviewed journal. He passed all of those reviews. By now, the selection and performance of the referees for Bellesiles’ 1996 paper and for Arming America by Knopf, and of the panelists for the Bancroft Prize award, can also be seen to have worked out rather poorly, after all, just like the personnel actions at Emory. These are all examples of normal peer review, which is in effect a system of social promotion. Of course there are no official admissions of fault, few individual retractions, not even many excuses. And above all, there are no consequences for the many panelists. . . . Recent scandals among American historians, including revelations of habitual plagiarism and general sloppiness, underscore an urgent need for a better process than peer review in its current form.

The entire assessment is rather damning.

UPDATE: Some interesting stuff in the comments at the bottom, too.

AN INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Excerpt:

“The term ‘the American left’ is as near to being meaningless or nonsensical as any term could really be in politics,” he says. “It isn’t really a force in politics anymore. And it would do well to ask itself why that is.”

Instead, its chief purpose seems to be avoiding such questions at all costs.

GARY HART FLYING TO MINNESOTA? And what do the cops do when they find Mickey sleeping in his car? Kausfiles has the scoop. . . .