AMPERSAND links to this article on antisemitism and seems to think (well, actually Meryl Yourish seems to think that Ampersand thinks) that I won’t link to it because it mentions antisemitism by right-wing extremists.

Sigh. As a grizzled weblog ancient, I should point out that I’ve been doing it all along (see, for example, this link from 9/11/2001 about the Posse Comitatus, and the various anti-Nazi sneers in response to the mail they’re always sending me, which I’ll let interested readers find by themselves). But the hardcore antisemites of the right are isolated. They’re members of tiny loser groups like the Posse Comitatus. The hardcore antisemites of the left are professors at Ivy League schools, or high-profile “black leaders.”

REP. ZOE LOFGREN’S Digital Choice and Freedom Act is analyzed over at LawMeme. They like it!

ANIMAL RIGHTS TERRORISM is condemned in an NRO article that cites a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center. One of the points made is the extent to which “mainstream” animal-rights groups serve as fronts, fundraisers, and facilitators for animal-rights terrorism.

RECORD COMPANIES FACED TOUGH QUESTIONS about the way they’re ripping off artists for royalties. I’m glad to hear that people are looking at legislation, but criminal investigations seem called-for here. Perhaps the U.S. Department of Justice, or some state attorneys general, will look into this.

(Via Faisal.com).

I HAVE A WEIRD LIFE: I spent the day blogging and rewiring the studio (crawling in confined, dark spaces trying to read the tiny legends on the back of things that other things are supposed to plug into: is that the input or the output? Hmm. . .) and installing a bunch of new music software which, surprisingly, all seems to be working properly. Then I got ready to cook dinner, only my wife needed a box of books taken to the shipping center for the small publishing company we run on the side (don’t ask) so I wound up picking up Chik-fil-A. Then a quick review of the New Jersey case before going on Hugh Hewitt’s show. Now I’m running my daughter a bath, while back on the Web.

I remember reading that the division of workplace and home was a modern phenomenon. I guess it’s gone away in the post-modern era. . . .

I’M JUST ABOUT TO BE ON Hugh Hewitt’s show.

HERE’S THE TEXT of the New Jersey Supreme Court ruling that allows Torricelli to be replaced on the ballot. Here’s a link to the New York Times story, here’s one to the Washington Post’s report, and here’s one to the Philadelphia Inquirer story. Based on a quick read, I don’t have much to say about the opinion except that I don’t see why the “two party system” deserves such legal stature.

Eugene Volokh also has little to say in response to such a sketchy opinion. Solly Ezekiel rules out partisan bias.

UPDATE: Volokh has more now. Read it!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Orrin Judd says the New Jersey Democrats should have suffered for not picking Cory Booker.

STILL ANOTHER UPDATE: Mickey Kaus sums up the opinion this way:

I would add that the court doesn’t appear to have made any effort to discern a statutory scheme here. The operative rule seems to be: “We’re going to do what we think is right unless there’s an incredibly clear black-letter statute saying we can’t. And then we can always declare it unconstitutional.” Does the elected legislature have any role to play here at all? (It’s ironic that the court pays such attention to finding what it thinks is the most democratic way to pick a lawmaker, even as it brushes aside the actual work-product of those democratically-elected lawmakers, namely statutes.)

Well said. Tony Adragna adds this observation:

I don’t see how those interests couldn’t have been served by simply leaving Torricelli on the ballot notwithstanding that he’s a loser — that he’s a loser threatens not the two party system. limits not participation, the party had a candidate on the ballot — chosen through the primary process — and “most importantly” voters still had a choice on Election Day… hmmm… I think this ruling is bad law….

There’s more.

Tom Maguire is unhappy, and so is IMAO. On the other hand, Jonathan Adler, whose post on this yesterday at The Corner seems to have hit pretty close to the mark, emails that the decision isn’t out of character for New Jersey courts in election disputes: “There’s a bunch of New Jersey case law on stretching election law to ensure voter ‘choice’ on the ballot.” Yeah, but if they really cared about voter choice, they’d have a line for “none of the above.”

Here are the choices the voters would have had. And here’s what one of the “choices” had to say.

BEN FISCHER HAS POSTED PART TWO of his response to Ted Rall’s windy screed.

CYNTHIA MCKINNEY UNMASKS the dark conspiracy that cost her her seat, an ethnic group generally known for nonviolence, hard work, and an avoidance of politics, but not this time. . . .

JOHN COLE has some observations on the Bonior/McDermott visit.

IT’S COSTING OUR ECONOMY A BILLION BUCKS A DAY, but they’ve still got time for fart jokes.

Well, hell, who doesn’t have time?

HEY — IF IT WORKS IN NEW JERSEY why not try it in California!

HERE’S A PERFECT SUMMATION of the McDermott/Bonior visit to Iraq.

CATHERINE SEIPP on what’s happened to feminism since 9/11. Nothing good — but then, not much good was happening before, either.

HERE’S A GREAT IDEA from Jonah Goldberg. Sign me up! . . .

THE NEW YORK TIMES’ LEGAL THEORY that people have a right to a “competitive race” could reach way beyond New Jersey. If, that is, it were to be taken seriously across the board. (Via The Power Line).

KEEPING THEIR ANTICS IN THE NEWS, Reps. Jim McDermott and David Bonior are now defending their behavior in a press conference.

This’ll keep it alive for a second weekend of Sunday political talk shows. How many of those are there left between now and the elections? Democratic leaders ought to be fuming over this.

UPDATE: And here’s someone who says their “Vietnam-era veteran” claim is, well, a dodge. There’s also a link to a transcript of their This Week appearance.

MORE ON THE MILITARY AT YALE: Here’s an interesting piece from last week that I found via The Corner:

Benjamin Klay ’03, who completed Officer Candidates School and has decided to join the Marines after graduation, said he felt Yalies’ opinions of military service shifted after Sept. 11, 2001.

“Before Sept. 11, many people would practically laugh in my face,” Klay wrote in an e-mail. “Many people seemed to think that Yalies are too good for the Marine Corps.”

Some of his friends tried to convince him not to join, others just called him crazy.

But some were supportive, and after Sept. 11, Klay said, the majority of reactions shifted from incredulity to respect.

Worth reading.

THE NEW STATESMAN has an article on weblogs and politics that’s sort of interesting. But it also reveals that they don’t quite get the game:

The journalist Stephen Pollard, the only British political blogger on the left, notes: “There are plenty of new British political blogs. And they are all – all – on the right.” But political blogging is in its infancy here. It remains up for grabs. Got a computer? Got a view? Get blogging. There is a war to be won.

This is wrong on several levels , but most interestingly, the piece seems to view the whole political battle — including the blogging part — as essentially religious warfare. But blogging’s political bias is not so much left/right as anti-idiot. Indeed, the original post that led to the term “anti-idiotarian” named Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as examples of the idiotarian crew. Of course, like many British leftists, they have a certain pre-rational, religious attitude toward politics. But that’s the point.

UPDATE: Clayton Cramer has blogged a response.

ANOTHER UPDATE: So has Brian Micklethwait of Samizdata.

ONE MORE: Nick Denton observes: “How appropriate. The right blogs out of amusement and rage; the earnest left urges its members to blog more to demonstrate political commitment.”

DEREK WILLIS, who’s a reporter for CQ, sends this link to the text of the Iraq resolution as it’s to be marked up this afternoon.

“I WILL MISS BOB TORRICELLI:” Michael Barone bids him a sort-of-fond farewell.

BTW, I’m continuing to update the New Jersey election issue here, and will continue to do so for as long as I can stand it. My sense is that a lot of people are arguing past each other, but I don’t have the time — or frankly, the energy — to do a lot of thinking about this myself and try to unravel all the tangled strands of debate so far, so I’m just linking to other people’s stuff. Maybe tonight.

I found it harder than most people to get heated up about the 2000 election, and this seems to me like a single-A-ball version of that dispute. Okay, maybe double-A. But at least it’s a change from the war, I guess.

MAKING PROGRESS: Dick Gephardt emails me the latest Flash commercial from the House Democratic Caucus. Leaving aside the merits, I have to say that the production values have improved a lot since the first effort, which I posted here a while back. The music is well used, and the whole thing just seems better done. I still don’t think it’s quite up to the production standards of FlashBunny, but there’s a steep learning curve here.

UPDATE: I’ve gotten some emails (some angry, some just confused) asking why I’m giving free publicity to Dick Gephardt, the enemy.

Well, you know, I’m not actually a Republican. I’m disgusted with the Democrats, and have been since the early Clinton years, for political opportunism and cheesiness of the sort mentioned by fellow ex-Democrat Shiloh Bucher below, but that doesn’t make them “the enemy.” And I’m pretty interested in the use of the Web for political purposes (duh). Back when I was a yellow-dog Democrat (back, that is, before the Democrats found something worse than a yellow dog) I managed to get along just fine with Republicans. I’m not one anymore, but that hardly means I don’t get along with Democrats. My own politics are such that if I only got along with people who agreed with me on everything, I wouldn’t get along with much of anyone.

The worst thing about the whole New Jersey mess is that it’s going to make this kind of polarization worse. Of course, I have to point out that if the federal goverment limited itself to its actual constitutional powers, there would be a lot less to fight over and national politics might be a bit less vicious. . . .

UPDATE: Dave Weinberger, who’s blogging from the Mac conference has put up a terrific flash ad of his own. Don’t miss it. Er, and I hope Gephardt’s folks will check it out, too.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON SUGGESTS that growing rifts in U.S. / European relations aren’t something new, but rather the reappearance of traditional pre-World War II attitudes. I think he’s probably right about this, and it makes for interesting reading in conjunction with this piece by David Gelernter, who argues that Europe is psychologically returning to the 1920s. Perhaps America is, too.

HOWARD KURTZ has the Torricelli-aftermath roundup and also manages to use the words “cheap trollop,” which is no small accomplishment, though — well, just read it.

WATCHING MCDERMOTT AND BONIOR FROM ABROAD, Austin Bay reports that he wasn’t impressed — and that their behavior may well have made a war more likely:

I still believe the United States hopes to remove Saddam via the 9mm ballot — a coup d’etat triggered by intense diplomatic and military pressure. Sources here in London indicate Mauretania and North Korea might offer Saddam asylum. Exile isn’t execution (his deserved fate), but it avoids expanded war. Like other psychological gambits, dangling exile could exert pressure within Saddam’s regime. The true soft underbelly of every dictatorship is internal rebellion. . . .

Then there’s the war Reps. Jim McDermott and David Bonior are waging, at the moment via embarrassing phone calls from Baghdad.

These men epitomize that slice of my generation trapped in a terrible quagmire. “Peaceniks” like McDermott and Bonior are still fighting the Vietnam War, and they are sadly indicative of how peaceniks have morphed into appeaseniks. Instead of principled Eugene McCarthy’s opposing LBJ’s War of Body Counts, they’ve become Neville Chamberlains — men who fail to comprehend radically changed circumstances.

Indeed.