ARMED LIBERAL has some advice for the Democrats. Whoever replaces Terry McAuliffe should hire him. Or at least read his blog daily.

FRESH FROM A FREE-SPEECH VICTORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA, F.I.R.E. is now targeting the University of Tennessee. Well, as I say below, that’s what happens when you abandon the defense of free speech that is supposed to be at the core of a University’s mission.

Interestingly, further down the page I discovered that Tennessee’s current President, John Shumaker, was involved in a similar incident at the University of Louisville, where he was President before coming to Tennessee. Shumaker hasn’t, to my knowledge, played much of a role in these events at Tennessee, but this is interesting background. I also learned that the whole affair has made Fox News’s Tongue Tied feature on political correctness, which I had missed.

All that I can say is that I’ve gotten a number of emails on this subject from alumni and fellow academics, and not a single one has supported the University’s actions. So far, it’s a public-relations debacle.

“PROGRESSIVE GOLD” may sound like one of those trademarks the tobacco companies allegedly registered in anticipation of marijuana legalization, but it’s actually a content-aggregation site featuring excerpts from lefty blogs.

Uh, but guys, that should be “TEC-9-toting, power-drunk nepotists and megalomaniacs” — not “TEK-9.” Just so you know.

BILL QUICK JUST ANNOUNCED THAT HE’S DECIDED TO QUIT BLOGGING. I’m speechless.

READER RACHEL CUNLIFFE sends this link to a moving post on Remembrance Day.

MY HOUSE ESCAPED THE TORNADOES, to Atrios’ undoubted dismay, but they did rather a lot of damage in the area and have killed an undetermined but substantial number of people. When you hear tornado warnings, pay attention.

A CRIME TO DISAGREE WITH THE DECISIONS OF INTERNATIONAL COURTS? Eugene Volokh comments on the latest European anti-free-speech initiative. And people say Ashcroft is an enemy of free speech? Sadly, if you scroll down you’ll see Eugene Volokh note that there are people here at the University of Tennessee who think the same way.

KEN LAYNE IS BACK!

ERIC ALTERMAN is accused of trivializing Down’s syndrome. Er, okay.

UPDATE: Reader Joaquim Machado sends this link and points out something I should have noticed: “Alterman was trivializing Down’s Syndrome only to those who do not know what an extra “Y” chromosome signifies.”

INTERESTING PIECE ON TURKEY in The New Yorker. Here’s a passage that leapt out at me:

Like the subjects of all former empires, we look at the United States with awe and disgust.

Envy, in other words. This is actually a real problem: Not only in Turkey (which many Turks still think of as a former empire, even if most Americans don’t) but in France, Russia, Germany, even Britain, to some degree. Bad enough that the United States exercises such power, but by doing so it reminds them of their own failures. Here’s a spot-on observation:

“I have no hangups about the United States,” Nuri Colakoglu said. “It’s a one-superpower world, and that is a fact. Russia is dead. Japan is in perennial economic crisis. Germany is trying still to deal with reunification. England is a bygone era. There is no one except the United States. Being alone is hard. If you fine-tune your policies, you can create a peace that could last a long time. But, if not, an opposition front will grow over time, and it will develop alliances and counter the existing supremacy.”

The question, of course, is what “fine-tuning” will mean.

SOME STUDENTS HERE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE are pushing for a ban on “racist” speech even though such a ban “technically violates the First Amendment.”

Actually, there’s nothing “technical” about it. I’m quite disappointed that some students are taking this tack. (I’m even more disappointed that some of them are law students, from the Black Law Students Association, whose faculty advisor I was for a while). I hope that the University will have the good sense not to listen to them. If not, well, then it will deserve the inevitable lawsuits and bad publicity.

INTERESTING STORY ON SPECIAL FORCES by Peter Maass.

HANNA ROSIN on the anti-semitism of the anti-Israel campus divestment movement:

There should be a way to design a movement objecting to Israel’s policies that is free of anti-Semitism. There even ought to be a legitimate way to object to Israel’s very existence on purely political grounds. But so far, it seems, no one has managed to do it.

Yes, that pretty much says it all. On the other hand, there appears to be an epidemic of good sense among Ivy League university presidents, as this statement by Lee Bollinger, Columbia’s President, indicates:

As President of Columbia, however, I want to state clearly that I will not lend any support to this proposal. The petition alleges human rights abuses and compares Israel to South Africa at the time of apartheid, an analogy I believe is both grotesque and offensive.

“Both grotesque and offensive.” Indeed.

JAMES LILEKS WRITES on why right-wingers (according to The New Yorker) disapprove of interracial friendships:

Explicitly racial attacks on Rice and Powell from the left – be it Belafonte or the radio host in Florida – are irrelevant, since the left at its heart believes in goodness for Blacks in general. The “right wing” puts up with Rice, but when they get together to sew sheets and pre-soak the cross wood with lighter fluid, you have to know her name comes up.

The other day I was talking with a Democrat friend about the election. She’d remarked, with equal amounts of sarcasm and good-natured ribbing, that the GOP had two years to build utopia. I thought about that later while walking Jasper around the block, and thought, no; they’re not about building utopia. Personally, I’m interested in keeping other people from building Utopia, because the more your believe you can create heaven on earth the more likely you are to set up guillotines in the public square to hasten the process. But we were exploring her opposition to the GOP, and she mentioned “Home schoolers, the religious right. They drive me nuts.”

There’s more. Read it.

BILL HOBBS, who covers Tennessee politics so I don’t have to, says that it’s now becoming clear that the income tax issue impacted the election. I’m sort of surprised to see Tennessee writers on the subject ignoring the Massachusetts anti-income tax initiative’s staggeringly high margin.

UPDATE: Frank Cagle reports that Democrat Phil Bredesen won the governorship because of support from East Tennessee Republicans. Cagle — who managed the campaign of Bredesen’s opponent, Van Hilleary — isn’t happy about that, but this certainly underscores the point I made earlier that Democrats elsewhere could learn from Bredesen’s campaign. I also note that Bredesen made a strong push for rural voters, which many Democratic strategists have said is a waste of time. But it seems to have paid off for him. Here’s what I said about Hilleary and Bredesen shortly before the election.

GLOBAL WARMING: GOOD FOR BUSINESS? Here’s a claim that it will cause the Northwest Passage to open up, shortening the sea route from Europe to Asia by a staggering 6,800 miles. Woohoo!

I don’t know how much to believe this, and I don’t suggest that this means global warming would be all good. But it does indicate that climate change has both up- and down-sides.

SPINSANITY says the press needs to be harder on the Bush Administration’s “dissembling.”

NICE VETERANS’ DAY POSTS from Geitner Simmons and MeanDean. And Sgt. Stryker suggests that we pay a visit here. J.D. Wetterling, meanwhile, offers a tale of heroism. And don’t miss SKBubba’s post, even though he did jump the gun and put it up yesterday.

UPDATE: Here are some more links, courtesy of the Taco Shop.

MAN, THAT KARL ROVE doesn’t miss a trick.

AFGHAN REFUGEES DEFRAUDING THE U.N. — by taking “repatriation money” and then, sensibly, not going back. James Morrow reports on his reaction.

I think that it’s actually a bad thing that these people aren’t going back. Afghanistan needs its expats. But I’m not surprised that the U.N. has blown it. Unfortunately, the division of labor in which the United States handles military stuff, while the U.N. and Europe handle the humanitarian and rebuilding work afterwards, doesn’t seem to work. Those guys can’t handle that job either.

In fact, Chris Patten is blocking an investigation of how Arafat has diverted “humanitarian aid” to support terrrorism. I suspect that such an investigation would show that the diversion happened with the knowledge, and tacit approval, of the EU leadership. And it sounds as if Patten has more than a mere suspicion of that himself.

(Patten story via William Sjostrom, who has a lot of good stuff today).

BLOGGER ERNEST MILLER (of LawMeme) has an oped in the L.A. Times on copy-protection, etc. Excerpt:

What would you think if you had to get permission from the architect before you could have your house painted another color? How would you feel if the photographer had to agree with your selection of a frame for a favorite photograph? What if the director of a movie could decide when it was OK for you to fast-forward through a DVD you had rented?

Sounds crazy? The last example is now the crux of a lawsuit brought by the Directors Guild of America against a number of companies that make DVD-playing software.

What has the DGA up in arms is the emergence of new technology that controls the playback of DVDs so that they can be enhanced with additional material, such as audio commentary by a film historian, or allows parents to filter out content they feel is inappropriate for their children.

In the words of DGA President Martha Coolidge: “They are taking films and using technology to alter them without permission from either their directors or their copyright holders.”

These guys don’t just think they own their movies. They think they own you.

UPDATE: Reader Michael Melton observes: “And this lawsuit comes from those who will change the beginning, middle, end and every other part of a book they turn into a movie.” Boy, isn’t that the truth!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Mark Baker adds: “Not only are these directors objecting to how I view movies in my home, but they’re probably the same ones creating special editions and then not allowing me to view the original on DVD if I so desire.”

Yep. Those would be the guys.

MICKEY KAUS thinks the Democrats’ search for “new ideas” is doomed. I’m not so sure. (Hey, I told you it was Gary Hart’s moment!).

Kaus also has comments on what he calls Cass Sunstein’s “spectacularly weak” oped on the dangers of (conservative) judicial activism in the New York Times. There’s also more on that topic over at The Volokh Conspiracy: just keep scrolling.

ANDREW SULLIVAN points out the combination of ignorance and misplaced moralism that makes up much of today’s left, with examples from Adam Clymer and Bill Moyers. He also mentions Garrison Keillor and Tom Paulin as examples of something worse.