MICHELE AT A SMALL VICTORY tells the story of her experience doing telemarketing for MADD. It’s not pretty.

DRIVING MR. MICKEY: So instead of blogging this afternoon (or, er, doing actual work) I went out to test-drive sports cars with Mickey Kaus, who was passing through town on his way back to Los Angeles. We had arranged this at the Yale Blog Conference, when Mickey remarked that he was going to do more automotive writing and I suggested a joint test drive.

Alas, though the company was all you could ask, the experience wasn’t. Our first stop was a local Nissan Dealer, where we intended to drive a 350Z sports car. I had dropped by the dealer to look at one a while back (which Mickey even noted on Kausfiles, to my surprise) and thought the car looked great. (That’s Kaus in the 350Z above).

It still does, but I have my reservations. The first was that the dealer had slapped a near-$6000 markup above the sticker price, turning the car from a bargain to, well, not a bargain. The second was that they wouldn’t let us drive it. (In accordance with journalistic ethics, or whatever, we didn’t tell them we were writing about it.) The salesman was extremely anxious to have me choose a car from the several on the lot, agree to buy it, “sign some papers” and then, and only then, actually drive the car.

I wasn’t interested, of course, in buying a car on the spot, only then to test drive it. We left, but the salesman convinced us to at least sit in the car and try out the stereo. I pulled a CD from my car and inserted it into the CD player, which promptly ate it and refused to function. The CD is still in the car, with a promise from the dealer that I’ll get it back someday. I have to say, though, that after that experience I’m pretty unimpressed. Bad enough that the dealer seemed so anxious to hustle us (well, me) into a sale: it’s pretty bad when you get such a major malfunction off the bat. I think Nissan is blowing it here: the 350Z is supposed to be one of those cars that casts a halo around the maker’s more mundane offerings. Instead, because of the dealer’s churlishness, it left me with a distinctly bad feeling. The devoured CD didn’t help, and seemed all the more irritating after the display of ‘tude. (I should stress that the salesman was nice enough, but the dealer’s policy was insulting and stupid).

Our next stop was the Infiniti dealer, to try the very similar Infiniti G35 sport coupe. Mickey thought the G35 looked better than the 350Z; I preferred the Z, but they’re both good-looking cars inside and out. The backseat in the G35, while vestigial, was bigger than I expected: not only big enough for a child, but big enough for most adults on short hauls, like piling people in to go from work to lunch.

The Infiniti dealership demonstrated something that I’ve noticed before: one of the best reasons for shopping at a luxury-car dealership is that they’re almost always nicer. (There was no nasty above-sticker markup, either). Unlike the snooty Nissan dealership, the Infiniti salesman handed us some keys and told us to come back when we were done. We took the G35 for a drive and it was nice . . . though not great. I’ll leave the automotive journalism to Kaus, who has all the cliches down (“the slick shifter comes readily to hand, which is valuable on the twisty bits. . .”). But while I liked it, I didn’t love it. It wasn’t the top-of-the-line sport package, which may account in part for its slightly vague feel. It was an excellent car overall, but not one to fall in love with. (Given that it’s nearly identical to the 350Z, this may be why the dealer didn’t want us to drive the Z until there was some sort of commitment. If so, that’s dirty pool even by car-dealer standards). The salesman promised to call me when they have a performance-package car in; I’ll try that one and report back with a final opinion.

What I will say is that if Nissan is looking for image-burnishing from the 350Z, they’d better get their dealers in on the program, because greed and cheesiness are sending the wrong signal. I left the Nissan dealership with a bad feeling. I left the Infiniti dealership thinking well of them. Since both dealers sell a number of other brands, the benefit to letting customers go away happy versus annoyed would seem to be significant.

I also think that the car industry is screwed up. Every time I start to think about buying a car, I put it off for months — or sometimes years — because they make the process unpleasant. And I say this as someone who always negotiates a good deal, but who doesn’t enjoy it. (Though the VW dealer who sold me my Passat made it as painless an experience as I’ve had along those lines, and gave me an excellent price, too.) If buying a car were as easy and pleasant as buying , say, a stereo, I think that people would buy new cars more often; I’m pretty sure that I would. You’d think that the automobile industry would have that figured out, but I’m afraid that fixing their distribution and sales system would threaten too many rice bowls.

WILL VEHRS SAYS PEOPLE ARE “PILING ON” TRENT LOTT:

Lott’s remarks at Strom Thurmond’s birthday bash were dumb. His follow-up comments were dumber. I wish Lott wasn’t the Senate Majority Leader. Lott deserves all the bashing he’s getting, but let’s not confuse that bashing with a substantive critique. These comments are not the stuff of Republicans switching over to the Democratic Party, or demands from within the Republican Party that Lott resign. I see this as a little partisan “payback” for the Wellstone Memorial debacle.

I don’t know. Will’s usually pretty good at finding the tone (he does PunditWatch, after all) but an awful lot of the people piling on Lott were piling on the Wellstone debacle, too. Me, for instance. And so far I think more Republicans than Democrats have called for Lott to step down from his position as Majority Leader.

There may be a payback angle in some quarters, but it just might be that both events were appalling, and that some of us were, thus, appalled by both.

As for Lott being treated unfairly for being merely stupid, well, here’s something Henry Fielding wrote:

Prudence is indeed the Duty which we owe to ourselves; and if we will be so much our own Enemies as to neglect it, we are not to wonder if the World is deficient in discharging their Duty to us; for when a Man lays the Foundation of his own Ruin, others will, I am afraid, be too apt to build upon it.

“Ruin” is too strong a word here, but Lott needs to apologize at the very least, and he probably ought to step down as Majority Leader. His remarks have shown him to be, at best, too imprudent for a position of such responsibility.

WHY I LOVE MY COLLEAGUES: I’m playing Morcheeba’s Big Calm in the office. I keep the tunes down, but there’s some leakage and I always tell my colleagues to let me know if it bothers them. The woman whose office is next door is feverishly finishing up a revision to a multi-volume treatise on trusts, so when she appeared at my door I was afraid I was bothering her.

“What’s that music?” she asked. “It’s great!”

I KEEP FORGETTING TO MENTION that Virginia Postrel wants your opinion on some photos. I like the middle one best, though I think that — even though they’re all better pix than the old one — she’s still better-looking in person.

JIM BENNETT WRITES that Turkey’s desire to join the EU has become an unhealthy obsession, and that the United States should stop encouraging it.

ANDREA SEE points out that the IndyMedia crowd is supporting the Iranian protests.

Good for them — though I wonder if that support would still be there if the United States were loudly calling for the mullahs’ overthrow.

In bigger news, Andrea’s gone 184 days without smoking! Bravo, Andrea!

THE NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE ISN’T IMPRESSED WITH TRENT LOTT. Jonah Goldberg calls Lott’s remarks “incandescently idiotic” — and then he really starts to criticize him.

David Frum, meanwhile, uses some rather, um, evocative imagery of his own:

I for one do not believe Trent Lott is a racist or a segregationist. My guess is that his speechwriter gave him note cards with a few jokes, and that when Lott finished reading them, he launched himself into what he probably intended to be nothing more than a big squirt of greasy flattery.

But that’s not what came out of Lott’s mouth. What came out of his mouth was the most emphatic repudiation of desegregation to be heard from a national political figure since George Wallace’s first presidential campaign. Lott’s words suggest that one of the three most powerful and visible Republicans in the nation privately thinks that desegregation, civil rights, and equal voting rights were all a big mistake.

These would be disgraceful thoughts to think, if Lott thought them. If Lott thought them, any Republican who accepted his leadership would share in the disgrace. So Lott needs to make it clear that he does not in fact think them. He owes his party, his state, his country, and his conscience something more – something much more – than a curt “I am sorry if you were offended.” If he can’t do that, Republicans need to make it clear that Lott no longer speaks for us.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think we’ve heard the last on this subject.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

Even the Republican Senate leader, Trent Lott, once suggested that Mr. O’Neill “needs to be careful with how he says what he believes.”

That’s gotta hurt.

HOWARD KURTZ’S “MEDIA NOTES” COLUMN today has nothing about Trent Lott, though it does have a reference to the “gaffe-prone O’Neill.” Um, O’Neill’s main problem was that he told the truth when it was inconvenient. Lott’s remarks seem worse to me. But what do I know?

Not much, apparently.

UPDATE: Justin Katz links to the C-SPAN stream of the event (Lott starts at 32:01) and suggests that maybe we’re being too hard on Lott, but then adds:

However, even giving him the benefit of the doubt — that he had in mind something other than civil rights, like federalism, or was merely being hyperbolic for the birthday boy — that a politician wouldn’t know the obvious implications that some would draw from such a statement suggests that he isn’t the best person to be the pointman of the party outside of the Presidency. Additionally, if the benefit of the doubt is merited, then Lott should strongly declare how he has been misinterpreted. Hopes to let such things fade do not speak well of leadership qualities.

No, they don’t.

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS AT MOTHERS AGAINST DRUNK DRIVING, writes Radley Balko in the L.A. Times:

“Defining down” what constitutes drunk driving serves MADD by exaggerating just how many drunk people get behind the wheel. Inflated drunk driving statistics confirm MADD’s relevance and help it raise money. Whether these new “drunks” actually are dangerous is beside the point.

Just last month, MADD issued a highly publicized grade of C for U.S. efforts to curb drunk driving. It cited increases in “alcohol-related traffic deaths” as its explanation for the low grade. The language that MADD used is important. “Alcohol-related” statistics include every accident in which someone involved had something to drink. That includes, for example, accidents in which a sober driver runs a red light and strikes a driver who had two beers and those in which a drunk stumbles out of a bar and into the path of a bus.

MADD regularly overlooks highway safety measures unrelated to alcohol when it is politically convenient. General Motors, for example, promised to give MADD $2.5 million over five years. Is it a coincidence that MADD is silent when GM glorifies speed in its marketing campaigns?

Yeah, but they’ve got a commercial about date rape, which doesn’t have much to do with drunk driving. Back when I was researching the ethics book, which has a section on nonprofits, I ran across a story about MADD’s shift in priorities, which included this passage:

We just have to realize that our mission isn’t simply just to prevent drunk driving anymore. Part of our mission now is to raise enough money.

This is a normal stage in the evolution of non-profits. They start out mission-driven, and after a while become institution-driven. Then fund-raising starts to drive the mission. Since they’re never happy to just declare victory and disband (the March of Dimes is still around, after all), they often wind up at a far remove from where they started, positionally.

What’s more, because it lacks the market discipline of the for-profit sector, and the supervision that public companies face from securities regulators, etc., the nonprofit sector is probably subject to far more financial chicanery and mismanagement. I suspect that there are some good stories here for interested investigative journalists.

UPDATE: TalkLeft has some further thoughts on MADD, and some interesting links.

OH, GOD: Another public de-linking announcement, this time from Megan McArdle. When will this madness stop? . . .

SUCCINCT: Arthur Silber says that Trent Lott is an Idiotarian, too.

“10,000 JOIN STUDENT PROTEST IN TEHERAN:”

More than 10,000 people defied riot police to gather outside Teheran university in a show of support for reformist students and a sign of a wider dissatisfaction with the regime.

This was by far the largest coming together of ordinary people in Teheran since student protests began a month ago, although in these difficult times it had to be a demonstration pretending not to demonstrate as police kept people moving along the pavements.

When groups began chanting slogans such as “Political prisoners must be freed” the riot police would draw their batons, forcing protesters to scatter down side streets.

It was the first time that the students had received such a display of public support, and a sign of a more general disillusionment with the authorities.

Bring it on. But here’s the key passage:

Among the crowd were many plain-clothes security agents who bundled dozens of people into police cars and videotaped faces in the crowd. At one point a security agent was surrounded by a catcalling crowd and defended himself with a can of pepper spray.

As he hurried down the street followed by jeers, the crowd began to chant, “Thank you, police!” to the regular police, who stood by and did not overtly harass people. The officers smiled back. One of them helped an injured old man out of the fray.

The cracks are showing.

BRENDAN MINITER WRITES THAT THE NINTH CIRCUIT GOT IT WRONG:

The generation that fought the Revolution and wrote the Constitution understood that law-abiding, armed citizens are the best domestic defense. The Ninth Circuit appears to intentionally overlook this point. They cite George Mason at the Constitutional Convention saying: “I wish that, in the case the general government should neglect to arm and discipline the militia, there should be an express declaration that the state governments might arm and discipline them.”

But taking this quote out of context misrepresents Mason’s argument. Reading the whole paragraph from which it is lifted reveals that Mason was actually arguing for the individual right to own firearms. Further up in the paragraph he said: “The British Parliament was advised by an artful man, who was governor of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly, but weaken them, and let them sink gradually, by totally disusing and neglecting the militia.”

Yes.

VIRGINIA POSTREL has more on Trent Lott:

Black voters aren’t the only ones turned off by Jim Crow nostalgia. The best way to position Republicans as intolerant barbarians is to keep Lott around as Senate leader. Plus he’s smarmy.

Ouch!

CLAYTON CRAMER IS FACT-CHECKING JUDGE REINHARDT on the Ninth Circuit’s Second Amendment decision from last week, and finds that it’s riddled with errors and misstatements.

Among other things, Cramer says that Reinhardt gets the Aymette case exactly backwards, citing it as an anti-individual rights precedent when in fact, as Cramer says, it’s a case finding an individual right to arms under both the Second Amendment and the Tennessee Constitution. (And Aymette is cited, rightly, in support of such a right in the U.S. Supreme Court’s Miller opinion.) Cramer has a link to the Aymette opinion, so you can read it for yourself. And scroll down for more on the Reinhardt / Bellesiles connection.

Eugene Volokh also has a rather sharp critique of Reinhardt’s opinion, and what Reinhardt somehow neglected to address in it.

ERIN O’CONNOR is still following the Boalt Hall sexual-harassment story, and is still suspicious.

CORNEL WEST UPDATE: He’s been at Princeton for less than a semester, but there are already student complaints.

SADDAM’S LAWYERS:

In this country and throughout Europe, antiwar organizations cite international law in urging President Bush not to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The National Council of Churches and other religious groups warn Bush that military action would “heighten concern in other countries about American respect for their integrity as nations, as well as for international law.” The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Britain threatens to haul Prime Minister Tony Blair into court and backs up its threat with long briefs and many footnotes.

All perfectly understandable; no one wants a world in which powerful countries feel free to go about smashing into weaker ones. The groups’ reading of the law — that the United States and its allies would have no right to take action without another Security Council resolution — may well be correct.

And yet, given that they have taken on Saddam Hussein as their client, you have to wonder whether, if their reading of the law is right, there isn’t something peculiar, something out of whack, about international law itself. Yes, national borders should be respected. But why should a gangster who has maintained power only by violating every norm of morality and law — including international law — be permitted the sanctuary of those borders? Why should his regime be entitled to the same protection as a government that represents its people?

This is an excellent question. I think that this affair has indicated that international law — at least the structure of wishful thinking that has been erected under that name since World War II — is broken, and in need of serious overhaul. It’s funny how people who generally support the abandonment of “outdated” principles of constitutional law and federalism, though, seem to think that Article Two, Section Four of the U.N. Charter — or even a particular interpretation thereof — is sacrosanct.

WATCH OUT, CORNERITES — Reason’s new group blog, Hit and Run, is up and running. Learn why David Geffen is a loser, why Kurt Vonnegut is an idiot, and why H.L. Mencken was a libertarian, among many other things.

MAYBE I SHOULD RETHINK MY POSITION: Jesse Jackson is calling on Trent Lott to resign as Majority Leader.

Well, even a broken clock is right twice a day. Meanwhile, Greg Barto warns against an orgy of political correctness:

As a Republican who has watched Trent Lott excel even Bob Dole in flushing my party’s opportunities down the toilet, I’ll shed no tears if he’s ousted. But I’d hate to see the rest of my party follow him as the Post and Times ferret out other ill-thought remarks by Republicans, while playing down such as Cynthia McKinney’s remarks about Jewish conspiracies and Bush’s part in 9/11 until she’s driven from office.

Well, so far the Times has been too busy with golf.

UPDATE: Silent Running says that I’m making too big a deal out of this:

Having actually seen the video of the event, it seemed more reminiscent of somebody’s loudmouthed used car salesman uncle getting up and saying ‘a few choice words’ – and the ‘sprit of the event’, the context was jovial, joking, and meant to be a light hearted celebration of a remarkable achievement. The majority of the ‘speechifying’ was along those lines.

Hmm. Well, okay. Assuming this is true, is that what a Senate Majority Leader ought to be like? Somebody’s loudmouthed used car salesman uncle?