AIRBRUSH AWARD: Eugene Volokh points out how a history newsletter (the NCC Washington Update, from the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History (NCCPH)) is handling the Bellesiles scandal — by pretending it’s just a question of a few unfortunate mistakes.

If we can’t trust historians to be honest about the past week, how can we trust them to be honest about things that happened years ago?

Here’s the link to the newsletter.

UPDATE: Geitner Simmons has some observations on how BarnesandNoble.com is dealing with Bellesiles.

WHY WAS I POSTING at 3:14 a.m.? I was fresh back from a (thankfully pointless) stint at the Children’s Hospital emergency room. I figured it was unnecessary, but, you know, better safe than sorry.

AN AMAZING NEW VOTING TECHNOLOGY: I’ve got a special election-day TechCentralStation column up.

IN ABOUT 24 HOURS, SOME CANDIDATES will need this book. Others will wish they did.

TELL MISSY that it’s her duty as an American to vote. Just in case she hasn’t gotten an automated phone call from the President.

UPDATE: Check the comments on this post for Missy’s report on ballot integrity in the District of Columbia:

Well, I’ll have everybody know that I did get extra sleep, BUT, as I was walking out the door picked up my voter registration card (which they didn’t ask to see, or any sort of identification, for that matter) and voted.

Jeez, that’s pathetic.

MICHAEL BARONE looks at long-term trends in the electorate.

BILL QUICK IS COLLECTING LINKS to bloggers covering elections in their areas.

IT’S OVER BETWEEN US, PHIL — STOP CALLING! Sitting here in the last few minutes I’ve gotten three calls in a row from Phil Bredesen, the Democratic candidate for governor. Two were recordings. One was somebody trying to get me to vote, I think — I hung up before they had a chance to get into the spiel. I’ve gotten several calls from Phil over the past couple of days, and I’m almost starting to wonder if this isn’t a clever Republican plan to irritate voters and turn them against him. If so, well, it’s clever.

UPDATE: Hey, the President just called and asked me to do my “duty as an American” and vote tomorrow. I think there was more about who I was supposed to vote for, but I hung up. I wanted to keep the line open if Phil called back. . . .

IT’S A “MISTING” involving the Norwegian Progress Party and the Guardian’s reportage thereon. If that’s not inside blogball, I don’t know what is.

UPDATE: Oliver Willis has sent an email implying that he invented the term “inside blogball.”

SOME THOUGHTS ON AMERICA’S OTHER “CULTURE OF VIOLENCE:”

The sniper is a former military man who leads a quiet life. He likes peanuts, praying to Allah, and playing checkers. He roots for the Mets, The Islanders, and Islamic terrorists who blow up the World Trade Center. In his spare time, he collects stamps and shoots up synagogues. It is still completely unclear why he might have committed the attacks.

Those same pundits who were so quick to point the finger at right wing culture when the Oklahoma federal building was bombed do not dare to similarly connect the dots and point out the contributing role that might have been played by the multitude of Islamofascist and/or anti-American statements and sentiments that have been so insistently expressed since last year’s September 11 attacks.

If the media thought Wayne LaPierre’s badmouthing federal agents was enough to cause Timothy McVeigh to commit his atrocities, then why aren’t they blaming Noam Chomsky’s badmouthing of America after September 11th for Mr. Muhammad’s attacks? Why aren’t they targeting Maxine Waters’s anti-American rants? Has no member of the media considered the impact Louis Farrakhan’s speeches about “white supremacy” and Judaism (“a gutter religion”) have had in creating an atmosphere in which the hate and violence demonstrated by Muhammad thrive?

A lot of people have been asking that question.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: And it looks like a pretty good bargain:

Six al-Qaida suspects were killed, including a top operative of Osama bin Laden, when their car was blasted with a Hellfire missile fired from a CIA-operated drone in northwest Yemen, U.S. officials told NBC News on Monday.

U.S. OFFICIALS told NBC News that Ali Qaed Sinan al-Harthi, a senior al-Qaida member, was among the dead. According to NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski, the car had been observed by the drone — an unmanned aircraft — for a period of time before it was attacked on Sunday. Secondary explosions were seen after the missile hit the vehicle, indicating there were explosives inside the car. Officials said they don’t know what the explosives were or why they were in the vehicle.

I think there’s a lot more going on in Yemen than is making the news, and I suspect that the troops in Djibouti, about whom we’re not hearing a lot, are playing a role. (Here’s a thought: What if the whole Iraq thing is misdirection? I don’t think so, because the diplomatic costs are too high. But if it is misdirection, it’s working!)

UPDATE: CNN’s poll (lower right) asks if the U.S. was right to “execute the terror suspects without a trial.” The U.S. was “attacking enemies,” not “executing suspects,” in my opinion. But even phrased the way CNN did it, the answer is running at 73% “yes.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Some thoughts on what this means about the state of the Yemeni government, at Sheep Free zone.

MICHELE AT A SMALL VICTORY blogs an open letter to Rachel Elbaum of MSNBC, whose puff-piece on antiwar websites got a brief mention here the other day. Excerpt:

In this article, you link to three anti-war sites and not one site with an opposing point of view. You interview two people who run anti-war sites but not one person who has a site that takes a pro-defense stance.

If this debate is playing out online, as your title suggests, you do not show it at all. The only reference you give to “pro-invasion” sites is to say, “There is a pro-invasion presence on the Net, but it is much smaller and exists mainly on message boards and in chat rooms..”

Had you attempted to do any research on this, rather than submit an obviously biased article, you could have come up with many “pro-invasion” sites. In fact, a quick search on Google would have landed you at sites like Andrew Sullivan or Bill Quick’s Daily Pundit.

Yeah, and then there’s yours truly. I get about as much traffic in a day as the ANSWER site she plugged gets in a week. Then there’s the matter that ANSWER itself is — according to non-warmonger David Corn of The Nation — a front group for the North Korea and Milosevic-supporting Worker’s World Party:

The party advocates socialist revolution and abolishing private property. It is a fan of Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba, and it hails North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il for preserving his country’s “socialist system,” which, according to the party’s newspaper, has kept North Korea “from falling under the sway of the transnational banks and corporations that dictate to most of the world.” The WWP has campaigned against the war-crimes trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. A recent Workers World editorial declared, “Iraq has done absolutely nothing wrong.”

Officially, the organizer of the Washington demonstration was International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism). But ANSWER is run by WWP activists, to such an extent that it seems fair to dub it a WWP front. Several key ANSWER officials — including spokesperson Brian Becker — are WWP members. Many local offices for ANSWER’s protest were housed in WWP offices. Earlier this year, when ANSWER conducted a press briefing, at least five of the 13 speakers were WWP activists. They were each identified, though, in other ways, including as members of the International Action Center.

It seems a bit, er, unprofessional to blandly mention ANSWER as “an international coalition of organizations devoted to ending war and racism” without providing this sort of context. Does Elbaum know this stuff? (To coin a phrase, don’t these people use Google?) Or does she just consider it non-newsworthy?

And Kim Du Toit’s National Ammo Day site is getting over a million hits a week. Wonder when MSNBC will do a story on that?

UPDATE: Justin Raimondo emails:

How well-informed could this reporter be if she neglected to mention antiwar.com — which gets around 25,000 unique visitors a day? Instead she mentions some hippie out in Vermont that nobody ever heard of. Go figure. It’s not a sinister conspiracy: just plain old stupidity.

Hmm. You know, I think he’s right. And it’s not like you have to be a rocket scientist to think of that URL.

DON’T MISS THE BANSHEE STUDIOS MAGAZINE — a certain bloggoddess is involved.

JIM BENNETT has some thoughts on sovereignty and transnational progressivism.

IS MARK KLEIMAN endorsing illegal voting procedures? He has a proposal for “express lane” voting, and responds to a suggestion by Jacob T. Levy that such a system would probably be illegal by saying:

Jacob T. Levy points out that the proposal above wouldn’t survive judicial scrutiny on equal protection grounds. He argues that it would impermissibly discriminate in favor of the literate or those voting straight tickets. (My expectation was that most of the people who took the quick option would simply vote for a limited number of offices, but clearly some people can do more in three minutes than others.) . . .

Still, it’s quite likely that Levy is correct about what a court would say about the proposal. But would a court enjoin an administrative decision, made in what is clearly an emergency setting, and would it do so fast enough to matter? I’m not sure. And if it didn’t, then it’s not clear what the court could do about it afterwards, other than enjoining a repetition. The votes would count.

The same applies to the Secretary of State: he could clearly rule that the procedure was improper, but it’s not clear what he could do about it.

So it’s illegal, but we can get away with it? Can this be what Kleiman meant to say? I certainly hope not.

UPDATE: Kleiman has posted an update, stressing that no voter would be disadvantaged by his proposal. I’m not sure that’s true, but okay, and I probably should have made that clear.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jacob T. Levy has blogged more on this too. Read the whole thing, but here’s the part that’s relevant to the above:

So if this were a Broward-only-election, I think that would be the end of the story; express-voting would be impermissible. The catch is that it’s not. If we were to resurrect the avowedly one-time-only equal protection claims made in Bush v Gore, then the variation across counties might outweigh the variation within Broward. That is, the unfairness to Browardites relative to the rest of the state could count for more than the unfairness to less-literate Browardites relative to more-literate ones. If Broward is more black or Hispanic than the rest of the state (which I assume but don’t know) then the VRA might push the same way, meaning that we wouldn’t need the Bush v Gore argument at all.

So, on reconsideration, I think it’s at least legally plausible that express-voting might be permissible. Administrative personnel and government officials have an obligation not to knowingly act in violation of the constitution, even if what they want to do is reasonable and democratic, and even if a court wouldn’t be able to stop them in time. (That, I take it, is InstaPundit’s point.) But if there’s room for legitimate legal and constitutional doubt, the officials’ own best understanding of the constitution can allow them to try things, even if a court might later disagree with them. And, having had an extra day to think about it, I now think there would be such doubt. That means that I think I side with Mark; this would be a reasonable thing for Broward officials to attempt, under the circumstances. The best interpretation of equal protection and the VRA might rule the experiment out; but this is not so certain as to require constitutional bad faith on the part of those who might attempt it.

Okay.

THIS PIECE from yesterday’s Washington Post, on the declining meaning of citizenship, is worth reading.

NANOTECHNOLOGY yields smart camouflage for military vehicles. It’s not clear how far along this actually is, but it’s cool.

DAVE KOPEL OFFERS A Second Amendment Senate voting guide. That sort of thing may matter to voters like this guy from Minnesota:

I’m an ACLU liberal. I’m pro-choice, pro-labor, pro-equality (races and sexes) and I favor strict church-state separation. I will not be voting those issues this time, because I also believe that the campaign for “gun safety” is the greatest threat to American liberty since the “war on drugs,” to which it is politically very similar.

In 1968, President Nixon recognized that a crusade against drugs, coupled with appropriate scare tactics, could become a potent political cause, and that Democrats were poorly positioned to respond in kind. Today, many Democrats (mostly urban) use the gun issue in precisely the same way, including the mindless scare tactics, knowing that Republicans cannot turn their backs on gun owners.

Should this strategy prove effective, we can anticipate the same escalating cost, proliferation of ineffective law, and swelling executive agencies (not to mention the erosion of civil liberties), which have characterized the self-defeating drug war.

If you are a gun owner (sportsman or otherwise) or a critic of the war on drugs, this prospect alone should scare you. If you are also a historian, with a grasp of the intent and purpose of the Second Amendment and its part in keeping the locus of political power among the people, you have a far better reason to join me.

Join me where? Mine is a simple standard. I will not vote for any candidate who supports gun control. It matters not whether the motive is cynical political ambition or well-meaning shortsightedness; the damage to the republic is the same.

I’m happiest when voting for a Democrat who respects gun rights, but until the national party renounces this divisive, destructive stance, I’ll be casting a lot of Republican votes. Other issues can wait. Ground lost on this one will never be regained.

JON EGGLESTON

DULUTH

How many voters like him are there? We’ll find out tomorrow, I guess.

VOTER TURNOUT? Reader Jim Hogue emails:

I keep hearing all the press comments about “low voter turn out.” Well, here in Texas (Dallas area) it’s anything but low. My wife and I tried to vote early last week and wound up “poll location shopping” to find ONE polling place that wasn’t a 30 – 45 mins wait!

I spoke with several election clerks and they all remarked that in 2, 5, & 8 years respectively they had never seen some much “early voting” activity.

Have you experienced the same type of thing in Tennessee? My mother, a Florida resident – Northwest Florida I hasten to add, where the predominantly conservative voters seem to have mastered the knack of voting – also commented that she had to wait longer than usual to vote.

Maybe turnout won’t be as low as the ‘proper’ media is claiming?

Early voting is very heavy here, based on what I’ve heard on the news and on my own experience — I tried last week and couldn’t do it as the line was way out the door and I hadn’t allowed enough time. Whether this will translate into higher turnout overall is beyond me.

UPDATE: Justin Katz is suspicious. I don’t favor conspiracy theories myself.

THE SIMPSONS ON GUN CONTROL: I’m sorry to say that I missed The Simpsons last night, but a reader sends this synopsis:

I’m surprised you haven’t blogged on this yet today, but the Simpsons last night had a story on gun control and self defense. It was a Treehouse of Horror Episode, with 3 stories. The second story had Lisa agitating for gun control after seeing a gravestone for someone who dies in the 1880’s with the inscription “I dream of a world without guns.” She imagines that he was a peaceful soul and convinces Springfield to ban guns.

As soon as everyone turns in their guns, Mayor Quimby announces to cheers that Springfield is defenseless. Then the dead guy who inspired Lisa rises from the dead and turns out to be Billy the Kid. He is joined by other old west villains and Kaiser Wilhelm. Together they terrorize Springfield until Homer gets a time machine from the Jerry Lewis-inventor guy, goes back in time to the day of the ban guns referendum, and gets everyone to shoot the graves of the returning dead just as they revive.

Wish I’d seen it.

UPDATE: Reader Steven Shivell says this description leaves out the ending:

After Future Homer came back in time to make everyone shoot the graves of the Dead people ANOTHER Future Homer wearing a very very cool future outfit (with a visor!!) comes back in time to tell everyone to throw away their guns, and that they were responsible for the end of the world. Moe (If i remember correctly) gets rather irritated and says “Enough Already” or something like that, and shoots the new Future Homer. The end of the story is that they have their guns.

Lane McFadden, meanwhile, has blogged the episode, noting: “So there’s no moral to this story. The people of Springfield needed guns to defend themselves, but preserving their guns also preserved great danger and risk of destruction. Hmm, sounds like…real life. No easy answers.” He also points out Moe’s attaction to “caveman hookers,” which was omitted from the accounts above. Porphyrogenitus meanwhile, emails on another Simpsons episode about weapons:

The best one was the one from years back with the Monkey’s Paw where Lisa

wishes for world peace, resulting in the elimination of all weapons, so

Koto at al (the tentacled aliens) take over armed with nothing better than

slingshots.

If I recall correctly, they were beaten by a board with a nail in it, and left prophesying that mankind would one day make a board and nail so big we would destroy ourselves. . . .

Boy, you want email, blog about The Simpsons.

UPDATE: A reader points out the devastating conclusion to Lane McFadden’s post: “Unfortunately, that leaves those of us in the Real World to come up with those answers, instead of relying on cartoons to explain complicated issues. Drat.” Drat, indeed.

“THE WORST CODERS IN WASHINGTON” is a list of legislators who have supported lousy anti-Internet legislation — with information on who’s paying them to do it. Worth reading, though it’s still something of a draft. Help ’em out in the comments section.

I STILL THINK THAT JESSE VENTURA SHOULD HAVE APPOINTED JAMES LILEKS TO THE SENATE. But he picked someone else instead, unaccountably.

THIS BOLD STAND against the “denial of sexual rights” isn’t what you might expect from the phrase.

INSPIRED by the popularity of Jim Lindgren’s article on Michael Bellesiles’ Arming America, the Yale Law Journal has started putting some of its articles online. Here is one, by Jed Rubenfeld on copyright law and the constitution, which concludes that “copyright’s central prohibition of piracy is fully constitutional, but its prohibition of unauthorized derivative works is not.”

“Freedom of imagination” plays an important role, too. Doesn’t Disney own the rights to that phrase?

TALKLEFT reports that Muhammad and Malvo will probably be tried in Virginia first. TalkLeft also thinks it’s unseemly to be basing trial strategy on where it’s easiest to get the death penalty:

We think deciding where to prosecute by the likelihood of the success of the death penalty is wrong and makes us look barbaric. . . . In addition, it’s unseemly to be talking as if death is a foregone conclusion. Doesn’t anyone remember that the two defendants have not yet had a trial or been found guilty? This is like a scene out of Alice and Wonderland: “No, No” said the Queen. “First the punishment, then the verdict.”

While I usually agree with TalkLeft on criminal-justice matters, this seems overwrought. Basing strategy on the death penalty is “barbaric” only if you already agree with TalkLeft that the death penalty is barbaric. (I don’t — I have problems with what Charles Black called “the inevitability of caprice and mistake,” but that’s entirely distinct from the character of the penalty itself). Nor does it seem inappropriate to me for prosecutors to base their strategy on getting the punishment that they believe the crime deserves. And doing so before the trial makes sense, as it’s not possible to do it after the trial.

TalkLeft will be on FoxNews this afternoon at 2:30 Eastern time. Perhaps we’ll get a more nuanced view then. Sadly, my campus cable system doesn’t get Fox, so I’ll miss it.