BROCK YATES REPORTS FROM THE FRONT LINES on Homeland Security (er, aren’t we all on the front lines for. . . oh, hell, never mind). He’s not impressed.

STUDENTS AT THE NEW SCHOOL are demanding that Bob Kerrey step down as President. My wife is an alumna of the New School, and I suspect she’d be surprised that the students managed to muster the energy. Heck, though, it’s better than working on your dissertation.

Maybe they should transfer to Concordia. They’d probably be happier there.

MORE ANTISEMITISM AT CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY: Martin Devon has the scoop. (There’s also a story here).

I wonder how the administrators there (Devon has their names and email addresses) feel about Concordia becoming synonymous in many people’s minds with north-of-the-border bigotry? Sadly, I’m afraid they may not care much at all.

UPDATE: There’s more information here. And Sari Stein emails:

Also, there’s a Chanukah event planned for 5pm today in the Hall building, in violation of the Hillel ban. Turnout is essential. If you could post something about it, I know lots of local Montrealers read your blog so it might help get more people to come out.

Okay. Somebody take a digital camera and post some pics.

COLLIN MAY AT INNOCENTS ABROAD has a lengthy and thoughtful discussion of the Denton/Reynolds tiff, with broader perspectives on transatlantic relations:

I’m a Canadian, and I’ve never lived in the backwoods of Tennessee, but did spend four years living in Boston. Since 1997, I’ve lived in Europe, first in Geneva and now in Paris. And as far as what I read, I prefer le Figaro to le Monde and the Times to the Guardian. Now, in terms of the accusation regarding Europhobia, I tend to agree with Reynolds.

First, his comments on Germany and Gerhard Schroeder aren’t exactly a sign of Europhobia. Most Germans are voicing similar complaints. In fact, Schroeder is now probably among the least respected of European politicians.

There’s more, and you should read it all if you’re interested in this subject.

MS. MAGAZINE is soliciting nominations for a list of female bloggers (in response to the Times piece from a couple of weeks ago).

Send ’em your nominations.

(Via TalkLeft).

SORRY for the late start and limited blogging today. I’ve got the same nasty cold that everyone has. I’ll spare you the Lileks-like details, but the worst thing is it just makes me feel kind of dizzy and stupid. Maybe a sudafed will help.

CENTRAL PARK JOGGER UPDATE: Looks like a rout for the original prosecutors, and a tremendous miscarriage of justice.

I expect the defendants will be happy to get on with their lives, but I want to repeat a point I raised earlier: what kind of compensation is enough to make up for what they went through? Most states provide niggardly compensation for people who are wrongly imprisoned, if they provide any at all, and most freed defendants aren’t in a position to negotiate.

I’d like to see a statute providing for substantial (and I mean substantial-according-to-the-standards-of-lawyers-and-Congressmen, not substantial-for-the-hoi-polloi) compensation for innocent people who are imprisoned. A million bucks a year? That’s a good place to start.

Any system of justice will sometimes imprison innocent people. You do the best you can to avoid that (or at least you should). But that’s no excuse not to try to make them whole when you realize there’s been a mistake. That’s just as much a legitimate expense as the salaries paid to prosecutors and judges.

UPDATE: Many readers emailed to say that the Central Park joggers are criminals even if they aren’t guilty of the rape in question. Well, maybe. Ann Coulter is certainly making this point.

But, you know, even if it’s true that doesn’t excuse jailing them for a crime that they didn’t commit. Meanwhile prosecutorial reader John Kluge writes:

As a prosecutor, the unraveling of the central park jogger case sends chills up my spine. You are never there when police interview a suspect and have no idea what really happens during those interviews. At the same time, once you have a confession, it is virtually impossible not to go forward with the prosecution, especially in a case involving a real victim. Police misconduct in obtaining false confessions puts prosecutors in an impossible position. Imagine if prosecutors had concluded that the confessions were coerced back at the time of trial and not gone forward with the cases. Back then, they didn’t have the serial rapist confessing to the crime. A prosecutor not going forward on a brutal gang rape against five youths who gave videotaped confessions would have caused riot. Prosecutors and the entire justice system depends on the integrity of the police conducting interogations of suspects. By the time the case gets to you, the accused already has a lawyer and is not going to talk anymore. The police are usually the only ones who get a crack at interviewing the accused. To think that there is a possiblity that some of the confessions on which I have based convictions may have been false or coerced by police is a truly disturbing thought.

Yes, and it should be. As far as I can tell, there are two solutions to this problem: (1) Require that a lawyer be present whenever the police talk to anyone; or (2) Videotape every second of interaction between suspects and the police. The former is prohibitively difficult — though why in God’s name anyone in custody talks to the police without a lawyer is beyond me. I watch those TV shows where the cops say “bring in a lawyer and the deal’s off” and I cringe. But I know it happens in real life.

The second seems quite feasible these days, and the absence of such taping should be sufficient, in my opinion, to make confessions obtained otherwise unadmissible.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Okay, on rereading Ann Coulter after the sudafed took effect, I think she’s still mainly arguing that they really are guilty of the rape in question. Meanwhile The Comedian blogs on what it takes to get a conviction overturned in New York.

LAST UPDATE: Justin Katz, like a lot of emailers, thinks I’ve been suckered by the New York Times on this one. Well, what convinced me was that Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau is reported to believe that the defendants are innocent. Did the Times get that part wrong? Morgenthau is in a position to know a lot more than me, has no incentive to be alarmist about this that I can see, and is a guy that I generally trust. And it’s awfully damned hard to get prosecutors to admit error even when it’s pretty clear, so when they do admit it, I tend to believe them.

HEY, thanks to the folks who hit the tipjar last week. Just got the transfer email from Amazon.

HOWELL RAINES’ MASSIVE EMBARRASSMENT: Mickey Kaus says the New York Times is racist in its treatment of Tiger Woods. Andrew Sullivan says the Times is facing internal revolt. And Fritz Schranck has started a “New York Times Insincerity Watch” feature, noting that the Times continues to profit from coverage of what it editorially regards as gender apartheid. After all, if (as the NYT suggests) Tiger Woods has a moral duty to boycott Augusta National at considerable cost to himself, what about the Times?

Schranck also compares this effort with great newspaper crusades of the past and finds it wanting:

The Washington Post kept alive the coverage of the Watergate break-in and the Nixon Administration during the 1972 presidential campaign.

The Los Angeles Times deserves credit for its extended treatment of the Rodney King beating case and its aftermath.

And now?

The New York Times devotes pages of ink and thousands of pixels on a membership controversy involving one of the most exclusive private country clubs on this green earth.

Compared to the issues previously deemed worthy of a sustained journalistic attack, this latest little tempest just doesn’t resonate with the awesome scope of its potential impact on social policy, now does it?

If Raines wanted to launch a big crusade, worthy of the Times — and one that would even hurt Republicans — he could devote the New York Times’ vast reportorial resources to unravelling the web of Saudi financial influence in Washington. Instead, he’s worried about golf.

SAY IT AIN’T SO!

Russian security officials suspect that the Chechens who seized a Moscow theatre in October had wealthy Arab sponsors in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states and have sought Washington’s support in finding the financiers.

Senior officials say they have traced a series of telephone calls from the gunmen to their “sponsors” in the Gulf.

During one call made to an unspecified Gulf state a financier asked for a video of scenes inside the theatre, and was told it could be made for a $1m fee.

“Several long telephone conversations were intercepted to Saudi Arabia, to the Emirates, and to Qatar.

“We can say for sure that the hostage-taking was financed from abroad, and the terrorists maintained permanent contact with their sponsors.”

He added that the leader of the hostage-takers, Mosvar Barayev, and several of his fellow Chechens had planned to flee to the Gulf once the crisis was over.

Well, the plan didn’t work out very well, did it?

NICK DENTON IS unhappy that I’ve been running items on Europe’s problems. He doesn’t say that the items I’m running are wrong, or that Europe doesn’t have problems. He’s just unhappy. Well, to be clear, my attitude isn’t schadenfreude, exactly. It’s more like someone who realizes that an alcoholic has to hit bottom before he gets help. I’ve been worried about where Europe has been headed for quite a while, and so far it seems to be following the script with worrisome accuracy. But far too many commentators in Europe, and in America, seem in denial about this. Thus, I think it’s worthwhile to point it out.

Sadly, Nick follows up with this post featuring snotty remarks about the ignorance of people living in “suburban Tennessee,” who obviously know nothing about Europe. Well, I lived in Germany for a while as a kid when my dad taught at Heidelberg, and when I was in law practice I had European clients like Ericsson and Siemens, and I have family in Paris who I visit occasionally, so I’m not exactly one of the Dukes of Hazzard mentioned in the post, though I claim no special expertise on European affairs. But, you know, you don’t need to be on the train to appreciate a train wreck when it’s happening. And it’s happening.

Was it an example of nasty anti-Europeanism when NPR ran a story this afternoon that was essentially identical to my Gerhard Schroeder post from last night?

I think the truth just hurts. I’m sorry about that. I’d rather see Europe doing well, though I don’t believe it’s possible for Europe to do well while pursuing the current vision of “Europe.” As for the sneers at me personally, well, I can take it, though I don’t like that sort of stuff from someone I like and respect, and I don’t think it does much to support Nick’s argument. Nick and I agreed to disagree about Europe a while ago (I thought). But I don’t talk about Nick that way, and I won’t.

UPDATE: Brazilian poet Nelson Ascher emails from Paris:

I come from a country where the intellectuals at least are strongly anti-American and philo-European. Besides, my family left the continent only after WW2 and the language we spoke at home wasn’t Portuguese, but Hungarian. I actually came to Europe, among other reasons, because of the landscape, or rather, the cityscapes, and because something around 9000 people are murdered every year in my 18 million people town or, in comparative numbers, 10 times as much as those killed by the Palestinians in Israel.

And curiously, I have been getting independently, and even before 911, to the same conclusions about Europe as you and many other bloggers. Besides, my conclusions are mainly based not on statistical data and economic or political analysis, but on the day to day observation of the way Europeans live, act and react.

Nothing (having spent my childhood and early youth under a military dictatorship) amazed me as much as the very convenient lack of interference by the population in the most important political decisions, a situation that is even more worrying when instead of individual countries we concentrate on the EU. I was already here during the recent elections and cannot remember any serious discussion on TV or in the press about France’s foreign policy, for instance. The press and the rest of the media, by the way, don’t much question the official line on most subjects. There are no French Chomskys, Swedish Howard Zinns, Italian Edward Saids or German Susan Sontags criticizing their own countries or continent: they only criticize the US (or the straw men of their own populist right wing). This is a very Soviet-like kind of free-speech.

Fortunately for you, the US is not as well acquainted with what we, in Brazil, call the civil servant mentality as we are. Even so, I don’t think there’s any need of describing it, is there? Enough to say that for me, in terms of work ethic and dynamism in general, Western Europeans are beginning, in a best case scenario, to look like Latin Americans and, in a worst case one, like the inhabitants of the Soviet empire.

Yeah, that’s how it seems to me, too. Meanwhile, Charles Murtaugh tried to dismiss Lileks’ worries about Euro-terrorism, but couldn’t manage to.

MARK KLEIMAN says it’s okay to call people felons even when they’ve never been convicted of felonies.

Somehow I’m reminded of the scene in the movie Stripes, which went something like this:

Q: Have either of you been convicted of a felony?

A: Uh, convicted? (Sigh of relief) No!

MORE SEX DISCRMINATION AT BERKELEY’S LAW SCHOOL. Stefan Sharkansky discovered this shocking example of gender apartheid. Doesn’t this violate the Constitution?

JUDY WOODRUFF, right-wing tool! Who knew?

IRAQIS COMPLAIN OF U.N. INSPECTORS SPYING.

A RARE GLIMPSE inside InstaPundit Secret Headquarters. Mutants, robot servants, and illegal weapons of mass destruction were removed for the picture.

WILL WARREN, THE POET LAUREATE OF THE BLOGOSPHERE, is retiring.

I hope that, like so many blogospheric retirements, this is temporary. And I hope that Will will leave his poems up, and save copies for eventual publication.

Meanwhile, here’s my favorite poem of Warren’s. Don’t miss it.

SCHROEDER ON THE ROPES: Ralf Goergens reports on Gerhard Schroeder’s many domestic political problems. According to Goergens, Schroeder has painted himself into a corner, politically:

Since the Bush administration isn’t really asking for anything the American military couldn’t do without (the US Army already has received all NBC-related equipment it needs from Germany some years ago) and has repeatedly caused internal trouble for Schroeder by similar requests parts of the German press are starting to suspect that GWB is doing it to show the Schroeder administration up (or maybe just for his own private amusement). . . .

Schroeder’s Red-Green government had won the elections by shamelessly pandering to the crucial 5 % of hard line leftists whose support they had lost because of their (timid) economic reforms during their first term in government. They can’t risk offending them now because there are important elections in two states early next year; if they want to have any chance to gain a majority in the Bundesrat (upper house of parliament) they’ll need to win them both. . . .

All this poses a dilemma for Schroeder. On the one hand he wants to get on GWB’s good side again, on the other he can’t afford to alienate his hard-left supporters again. He might even try a repeat-performance of his federal election campaign, provided the war on Iraq isn’t over by then. I sincerely hope that he won’t sink this low; Germany might even be unceremoniously kicked out of NATO. Except for ideologues Germans in general don’t hate America, but a lot of them are going to vote for anybody who promises to keep them out of such conflicts, however foolish that may be considering circumstances. I think that even that won’t help the Social Democrats, public opinion is solidly against them and there are real rifts even within Schroeder’s government.

Read the whole, much longer post. Very interesting. Meanwhile fellow Germanoblogger Papa Scott reports that Schroeder’s candidates are being accused of lying about budget projections. I’m as shocked as Papa Scott that anyone would accuse a politician of lying.

SPIKED! Let the Raines-bashing begin.

Er, well, continue, anyway.

UPDATE: Dan Lewis wonders why his phone isn’t ringing.

THE CDC WILL BE BROADCASTING A PROGRAM ON SMALLPOX PREPAREDNESS Thursday and Friday. It’s also going to be available by Webcast. Links are at The Bloviator.

ARTHUR SILBER ENTERS THE GAY MARRIAGE DEBATE: His solution — privatize it!

THE SAUDIS ARE REPORTEDLY RALLYING AGAINST DEMOCRACY in the Mideast:

Arab diplomatic sources said the kingdom has been consulting with Egypt, Syria and the Gulf states regarding the ramifications of post-Saddam reforms in Iraq. The sources said Saudi Arabia is concerned that it will be the next target of the Bush administration. . . .

“No one can change the Saudi regime but Allah,” Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef Bin Abdul Aziz said.

The proposed accord would also commit league members to oppose any U.S. attempt to freeze the assets of any Arab government. The Saudi aim is to prevent Washington from blocking Saudi assets in the United States or in allied nations that stem from the multi-trillion dollar suit by the families of victims of the Al Qaida attacks on New York and Washington more than a year ago.

It’s interesting that those lawsuits are going forward.

JUSTIN SODANO is back from his blogging hiatus.

“FIERCE FIGHTING” breaks out in Northern Iraq.

SORRY FOR THE LIMITED BLOGGING: I’m quite busy today. In my absence, ponder the significance of this development:

ANKARA, Turkey — The Turkish government Tuesday offered the use of its bases in a potential war against Iraq, as U.S. officials confirmed that Saudi Arabia has also agreed to give its long-sought military support, twin moves that could clear the way for a formidable attack on multiple fronts.

Particularly as timed with this development:

WASHINGTON — President Bush today dismissed reports that Iraqi weapons inspections are going well, saying Saddam Hussein’s actions away from the U.N. team’s work prove that Saddam “is not somebody who looks like he’s interested in complying.”

Back later.