GRAY DAVIS / SFSU UPDATE: Meryl Yourish reports that Gray Davis has ordered California universities to address hatred and antisemitism. Hey, if he keeps doing stuff like that he might get reelected.

MORE ON THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY FREE-SPEECH DEBACLE.

THE NEW SMARTERHARPERSINDEX IS UP!

JOANNE JACOBS has a piece on problems with economics education. I wonder what Brad De Long thinks.

THE POLITBURO FINDS MORE BIAS AT THE NEW YORK TIMES:

According to the New York Times, the American bombing campaign in Afghanistan has created a “Legacy of Misery” for the inhabitants of the country (see image below). You heard that right; the Americans, not the Taliban, have, by insolently supplanting a misogynistic, thuggish theocracy with a nascent democracy, created a “legacy of misery.” Rather than the typically somnolent quotes from Global Exchange about unaffectionate military tactics, the NYT editors present a slide show of wounded children.

It never stops.

ROBERT MUSIL says that Robert Rubin faces serious risk under the False Statements Act for statements he made denying or obfuscating his involvement with certain Enron-related events.

If so, this is probably a testament to the excessive reach of the False Statements Act, though that excessive reach is absolutely a matter of legislative intent — and if he were nailed on this, Rubin wouldn’t be the first to suffer from that excessive reach.

Those seriously interested in this should read Peter W. Morgan’s The Undefined Crime of Lying to Congress: Ethics Reform and the Rule of Law, 86 Nw. U. L. Rev. 177 (1992), which explains the way in which the False Statements Act (which applies to statements made to any federal official, not just Congress) has been used and abused.

UPDATE: Mark Levin says Rubin has other problems though.

KYLE STILL AND JEFF COOPER have an interesting debate going concerning the Ninth Amendment. I’m a big Ninth Amendment fan. I don’t agree with Cooper, though, that the Ninth Amendment poses a problem for strict constructionists. It only poses a problem for intellectually dishonest strict constructionists of the Robert Bork variety. I spelled this out at (no doubt excessive) length in a 1990 law review article entitled Sex, Lies and Jurisprudence: Robert Bork, Griswold, and the Philosophy of Original Understanding, which unfortunately isn’t available on the web.

The gist was that if you believe in following the Framers’ intentions, and if the Framers clearly believed in unenumerated rights, then you can’t dismiss the Ninth Amendment as a mere “inkblot,” as Bork did in his confirmation hearings. If you’ve got access to a law library, the cite is 24 Ga. L. Rev. 1045 (1990).

UPDATE: I’ve uploaded an HTML version. It’s a bit on the lengthy side. On the same topic, but much shorter, is this piece, entitled Penumbral Reasoning on the Right, that appeared in the Penn law review in 1992. Should you fail to slog through the first piece, please understand that it is not an argument that original understanding is bad as a means of interpretation, only that (1) it won’t do what Bork claims; and (2) won’t produce the results he wants. Indeed, in the Sex piece I demonstrate that the very sources cited by Bork in criticizing Griswold v. Connecticut turn out to actually support the reasoning of the majority, rather than Bork’s critique. (It’s difficult to believe that Bork actually read Joseph Story very closely, in light of what Story says as compared to what Bork says, despite Bork’s repeated invocation of Story as a key source of understanding regarding the Framers’ intent.) If you don’t read the whole thing, you can find the nub of the argument at page 1081 (*1081).

So there. More law-review stuff than I usually put on InstaPundit, but occasionally the day job intrudes.

JOHN HUGHES ASKS who will lead an Arab Renaissance. The bigger question is whether enough Arabs will want one.

“WHAT I LEARNED IN A MONTH AWAY FROM BLOGGING” — at The Spoons Experience. Very interesting perspective.

FORGET THE PATRIOT ACT, or TIPS: Eugene Volokh has found a bigger threat to civil liberties.

HOWARD BASHMAN has an example of why church/state separation isn’t such a bad idea. Funny, though: lots of University folks don’t mind blending the two, so long as the church in question isn’t Christian.

“CUT THEIR PAY AND SEND THEM HOME:” I was all set to write a snarky item about Lamar Alexander’s proposal (back when running for President) to limit Congress by cutting their pay and sending them home, and how his tune had changed now that he was running for Senate. But when I checked (yeah, I do that) I found that he’s still saying it. (Scroll down to Plain Talk commentary 6, or click here to hear it in WMA, or here for RealAudio). I just hadn’t heard that ad. (They mostly seem to be running the gun commercials here).

Advantage: Alexander.

A FEW DAYS AGO, I wrote that there was no program for the Mac that compares with Sonic Foundry’s Acid. Todd Fletcher wrote me to say that Ableton Live fills that bill. Cool. I’ll have to check it out.

I’ve lost the email, but I did save the link, and I was reminded when I read this interesting piece in Wired about what the spread of computer-based music tools is doing to the industry. It’s very much like weblogging. Guess that’s why I do both, though I’ve been slacking on the music front.

UPDATE: Eric Olsen has more about computer-based music.

PUBLIC DEFENDERS ARE discovering the Second Amendment in the wake of the Justice Department’s change in position. Though the story has the predictable New York Times slant, it’s pretty interesting.

It’s possible, as the Times story implies, that Ashcroft is dumb enough that he thought the change in position wouldn’t create any new litigation. It’s more likely that he’s smart enough to have found a way to turn a big liberal constituency group, public defenders and criminal-defense lawyers, into supporters of the Second Amendment.

UPDATE: Jeralyn Merritt at Talkleft says I’m wrong about Ashcroft. Well, sort of.

OOPS. Jason Rylander is all over me for saying that Congress is overpaid. Only what I said was: “Personally, I don’t think that members of Congress are overpaid. But I think that their sleaze in pursuing pay raises is a small, and clearly visible, example of their sleaze in pursuing lots of other ends.”

See, I don’t think they’re overpaid. Just over-sleazy. There’s a difference.

UPDATE: Rand Simberg has his own Congressional pay increase proposal. Not only does he think they’re underpaid, he thinks they’re overworked, and proposes to solve both problems.

PETER MAAS has an interesting post on why Al Qaeda has failed. (Via Nick Denton.)

TED TURNER LAND-GRAB UPDATE: WyethWire says it’s not the first time.

FLIT continues to cover the Kandahar bombing incident, which killed 4 Canadian soldiers, like white on rice.

KEN LAYNE has the last word on Steve Earle.

YOU KNOW IT’S A SLOW NEWS SEASON when people are arguing about who Mike Barnicle’s cousins are.

CONSPIRACY THEORY UPDATE: Here’s an interesting exchange over a conspiracy-debunking piece by The Nation’s David Corn.

I know some people on the right who have been hoping that The Nation would give a lot of play to the conspiracists, thus discrediting itself. They don’t seem to be following the script, though, as these wise words from Corn demonstrate:

Lots of crazy schemes in the cold war were drafted and– thankfully–not implemented, such as a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. And, yes, in the past decades, the CIA and its clandestine cousins have engaged in horrendous actions–some of which I have chronicled in Blond Ghost and the pages of The Nation. Yet none of this proves anything about September 11. I return to a simple point: Let doubters pursue questions, nothing is wrong with that. In fact, it’s healthy. But allegations of this variety demand proof. Skeptics are not free of responsibility.

Totalitarian? Jean Santerre accuses me of that. This e-mailer is in desperate need of perspective. Stalin was a totalitarian. I, on the other hand, am concerned that conspiracy theorizing distracts people from the actual malfeasance, mistakes and misdeeds of the US government and the intelligence community. My criterion is rather basic, and I am sorry it has eluded Santerre: One should assert what one can prove as accurate and truthful.

UDPATE: This L.A. Weekly piece on Euro-conspiracists is worth reading, too.

CAN IT GET ANY STUPIDER? The MPAA, and its reliable shill Sen. Fritz Hollings (D -Disney), are now trying to make it impossible for you to record movies from TV.

I think we should teach ’em a lesson by reducing the copyright term on movies to 5 years.

BILL QUICK says that Howard Kurtz is right to say that Bush has been Clintonized — but Quick says that it’s bad news for the Democrats:

It’s just that what “Clintonization” really means is that the majority of people simply don’t trust either the motives or the good intentions of those who oppose the President. This infuriated the right during the last administration, and it infuriates the left under this one.

CONGRESSIONAL PAY RAISE: Howard Fienberg emails this bit from Leno last night:

Jay Leno: “Is this unbelievable? Congress just voted to give themselves a pay raise. Another pay raise. This is their fourth pay raise in four years. Anybody here had a pay raise every year? No. And yesterday, House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, he defended the congressional pay raise. He said Congress works hard. And all of that hard work has certainly paid off, huh? Yeah. Let’s recognize a job well done. We are at war. Terrorists all over the place. Wall Street’s collapsing. People are out of work. Retirement funds are gone. Imagine if they hadn’t goofed off. Oh, my God.

“On one hand, Congress does need this pay raise, you know, since those Enron checks dried up. You know, those are gone now, so they don’t have that coming in anymore.

“I got a better idea. Instead of a salary, let’s put Congress on commission. They don’t get paid unless they do something right.”

You tell ’em, Jay. Personally, I don’t think that members of Congress are overpaid. But I think that their sleaze in pursuing pay raises is a small, and clearly visible, example of their sleaze in pursuing lots of other ends. All too often, the goal is to make sure the public doesn’t know what’s going on until it’s too late.

THE AMERICAN PROSPECT is debunking the Afghan-oil-pipeline conspiracy theories in a masterful piece.

One item: the sinister Unocal pipeline? Unocal doesn’t want it. It’s only the countries that it would have traversed that want it. (Some imperialism, huh?)

Will this change any minds? Those that are open to reason, perhaps. But I don’t think there are many of those in the “this is all about oil” crowd.