THE REPORT ON PIM FORTUYN’S ASSASSINATION IS OUT, and Michiel Visser is on the story.

UNDER THE RADAR: Radley Balko reports that “longtime drug warrior Dan Burton made some stunning comments. In a hearing entitled ‘America’s Heroin Crisis, Colombian Heroin and How We Can Improve Plan Colombia,’ Burton stopped just a hair short of advocating the decriminalization of drugs.”

Balko’s got video.

MORE DOUBTS on the authenticity of the bin Laden tape.

I’m kind of skeptical of this analysis, though. . . .

READER WILL WARREN is fact-checking Trent Lott:

In Lott’s BET appearance, when he was discussing his born-again commitment to affirmative action, he told a factual whopper that I haven’t seen anybody pick up on yet.

The Lott quote: “Again, you can get into arguments about timetables and quotas. Here’s what I think, though: I think you’ve got to have an aggressive effort in America to make everybody have a chance. Harvard has a program where one in three of their students are alumni children. That, you know, we need to balance this out more, and I think that we should encourage minorities to have an opportunity across the board.”

One in three? 33% of Harvard students are “legacies”?! How we still groan under the yoke of unjust inherited privilege!

Problem: not true. Not even close. According to the Boston Globe, children of alumni actually make up “about 10%” of each Harvard entering class.

(www.harvard60.org/status.html)

Apparently the Senate Republican leader, having suddenly joined the enthusiasts for racial preferences, has immediately adopted their common practice of greatly exaggerating the institutional obstacles faced by black Americans today.

But perhaps Harvard is an exception; perhaps Mr. Lott need only find another college that fits his “one in three” notion. To get a broader picture of the boot heel of oppression under which those not born to academic privilege now suffer of the unjust class system in which some blacks don’t “have a chance,” in the Republican leader’s words, Googling for “the class of” and “children of alumni” or “alumni children” reveals the following percentages of alumni children in recent freshman classes of other institutions:

Princeton: 12.4%; 11.6% (different years)

Yale: 13.4%

U. of Penn.: 10%

Brown: 7%; “about 10%” (different years)

Columbia: 6%

Cornell: 13%

U. of Chicago: “just over 5 percent”

Bucknell: 5.6%

Boston College: 12.1%

Holy Cross: 10.7%

Wake Forest: “about 8%”

Johns Hopkins: 12.4%

Notre Dame: 23%; 22% (different years)

Ithaca College: 1.8%

U. of Virginia: 12.6%

U. of Rochester: 5.4%

Amherst: 10%

Middlebury: 5%

Colby: 4%

Villanova: 7%

I am just stunned by the injustice of it all. Do we really want to live in a world in which only 9 out of 10 students at our most elite colleges are not the children of alumni? In which, even at less selective colleges, only 95 to 98 out of 100 students are not “legacies”? Praise the Lord that the Senate Republican leader has seen the light!

I haven’t checked these data myself, but Warren’s always been trustworthy.

“ANTI-BRONTEISM” is haunting America’s workforce. Something must be done!

LOTT’S B.E.T. APPEARANCE seems mostly to have made him the butt of jokes. Kind of mean ones.

THE NEW YORK TIMES HAS A GOOD STORY on the Lott affair, and how it was kept alive from the right, not the left.

I’ve heard some folks say “I’d rather lose the Senate than keep it with Lott as Majority Leader.” I think that’s right, though I think Lott’s purported threat to quit and let the Democrats take the Senate is hot air and bluster even if the reports are true. He won’t go back to Mississippi — they never do. And he won’t be able to stay in Washington and make a living as a fat-cat lobbyist after (1) making racist remarks; and then (2) betraying his party. And he knows that.

This story in the Christian Science Monitor sort of agrees, though it goes out of its way to minimize the contributions of weblogs. Well, I agree with Kaus that we should avoid “blogger triumphalism” here. But the story quotes an “online media expert” as saying that NPR drove the story, which is just absurd.

SOUR BOB HAS A NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION that I’d like to echo. And he’s dissing Dr. Phil something fierce, too.

PROFESSOR JAMES JACOBS OF N.Y.U. SAYS THE NINTH CIRCUIT GOT IT WRONG ON THE SECOND AMENDMENT, and that’s a bad thing for gun control. He’s right.

Gun controls that would keep guns out of the hands of criminals — as opposed to ordinary Americans — wouldn’t violate even a strong individual-right interpretation of the Second Amendment. The real barriers to gun control are political, and would largely vanish if Americans trusted the courts to protect their Second Amendment rights.

HERE’S A LONG AND EXTENSIVELY FOOTNOTED CRITIQUE OF MICHAEL MOORE. It concludes:

Moore is not interested in exploring complexity. He likes to find scapegoats – generally some mix of corporations, America, and “stupid white males” – and hammer them. To properly arouse anger at his scapegoats, he ignores nuance and subtlety, and misrepresents statistics. It is not enough to criticize the NRA – Moore needs to make Charlton Heston look like a racist. It is not enough to find out why other countries have a lower murder rate than the US – Moore needs to make the difference in murder rates sound 20 times as bad as it is. And God knows he can’t admit that in other crime categories America is actually safer than other countries. Then people might actually take a balanced look at the US, instead of finding America despicable.

Moore is an extremely funny commentator, and he’s a talented filmmaker. Often his observations about politics are bluntly true, and need saying. But he wastes his talent on hatchet jobs. An honest and thought-provoking documentary about violence in America would be extremely valuable. That Michael Moore is incapable of making such a movie is everyone’s loss.

That Moore is the number-one lefty commentator of the moment is explanation enough for why the left has lost the moral high ground.

ANDREW SULLIVAN has it right:

I’m second to few in believing that Trent Lott should step down as SML. But that doesn’t mean I like the racial politics of the current Democratic Party. In fact, the way some far-left Democrats use race is no less repulsive than the way some far-right Republicans do. The equation of opposition to affirmative action or hate-crime laws or any other number of leftist policies with racism strikes me as a massively cheap shot. (I was on WBUR last night and paleo-lib Jack Beatty went straight to that knee-jerk point. Grrrr.) And the blithe assumption of moral superiority is equally galling.

Galling, and unjustified. The Democrats lost the high ground on race when they became the party of quotas and racial spoils systems instead of equal opportunity. That was sometime back before I hit puberty.

UPDATE: Armed Liberal has some thoughts on the “high ground.”

DAN HANSON HAS advice for celebrities touring Iraq.

IN THE EARLY STAGES OF THE LOTT AFFAIR, I seem to recall a bit of Canadian condescension about America’s race problems. I guess that’s over with.

YASSER ARAFAT seems to be behind in his paperwork. I know how it feels.

FLOOD THE ZONE! It’s a cathartic Lott-a-Rama over at Unqualified Offerings. Just keep scrolling.

BEN STEIN has a pessimistic column. I think that things are much better than he makes them sound, though I agree with his main point.

UPDATE: Sasha Volokh has a thoughtful response.

A SHOCKING NEW REVELATION about Trent Lott. Well, after Bill Clinton I guess it’s not entirely shocking.

UPDATE: I didn’t see the BET appearance (Rugrats takes precedence around here) but Josh Marshall says that Trent Lott is “toast” and Rod Dreher says it’s time for a “mercy killing.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Drudge says it’s “step down or be pushed” for Lott.

ERIN O’CONNOR, who has stayed on top of the Boalt sexual harassment case, says that — despite claims by one professor that the problem is the Berkeley law school’s sexist culture — the real problem is its alcoholic culture.

FUNDITRY has been keeping a list of people who want Trent Lott to step down. It’s getting pretty long.

UPDATE — EQUAL TIME: Phil Bowermaster has posted a list of Lott’s supporters.

THE VOLOKH CONSPIRACY has been discussing the question of whether there could be a Bellesiles in the legal-scholarship world. I think the answer is “yes and no.”

No, I don’t think that someone who engaged in Bellesiles’ extensive pattern of fabrication and misquotation could get away with it in a typical law review. Law reviews check statements against footnotes to ensure that the sources cited in the footnotes actually say what the article claims they do. This isn’t perfect — nothing is — but my experience is that it tends more often to be excruciatingly exact than sloppy. Bellesiles’ fabricated probate records might not have been caught this way, as law review staffers wouldn’t visit the archives, and might not have asked him to produce his summaries of data. But his many other misrepresentations would have turned up, and that probably would have led to him being asked to provide more support or have his article rejected.

Peer review doesn’t do this. On the other hand, it’s stronger on the subject of methodology. Law students don’t generally know much about methodology, or statistics (though there’s usually one person on a law review staff who knows something about the subject). Peer reviewers do, and they pay a lot of attention. But they don’t generally check the data, so peer review is chiefly a protection against honest but inept work, not out-and-out fraud. A good academic fraud, after all, is meticulous on methodology, but then makes up the data to achieve the desired result.

When Bellesiles’ problems first came under discussion, a number of historians on a constitutional-law email list I subscribe to dismissed legal scholars’ critiques as meaningless because law journals aren’t peer-reviewed. That was something of a non sequitur, of course. Their faith in peer-review also turned out to be just plain wrong. Peer review didn’t stop Bellesiles. Law review cite-checking would have. That’s hardly dispositive as to the relative value of legal or historical scholarship, but it does suggest that the genial contempt sometimes expressed toward legal scholarship by historians is a bit hubristic.

UPDATE: Clayton Cramer has some further observations on peer review, and links to a photocopy of a letter from a peer-reviewed journal that’s worth reading.

TALKLEFT HAS A ROUNDUP of developments in the Racine, Wisconsin rave case.

FLOOD THE ZONE! Best of the Web has a lot of Lott news today. I’ve tried to write about other stuff, so if you want the latest on the machinations among Senate Republicans, hop on over there.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall, by the way, is really the blogger who broke this story, and what’s interesting is that this transcript from CNN lists him as “JOSHUA MARSHALL, TALKINGPOINTSMEMO.COM” rather than in terms of his connection to The Washington Monthly.

HOW DARE WE IMPOSE FREEDOM ON THE IRAQIS WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT! I saw something along these lines on some antiwar blog earlier, but I forget where it was. However, even that rather dubious line of argument just got weaker as there’s some evidence that it wouldn’t be without their consent:

IN A REPORT released early this month, International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank, found that most Iraqis interviewed support the idea of an invasion, as well as U.S. occupation during the transition to a post-Saddam government. Iraqis have had it with more than a decade of impoverishment, isolation and fear, says the study’s researcher who asked not to be named. “I found very few people who were against American intervention,” the researcher says. “People are depressed, exhausted. They can’t take it anymore.” Those against intervention, she says, enjoyed privileges under the regime, or they feared Americans would call for a rising against Saddam, then abandon it (as in the aftermath of the Kuwait war in 1991). But a young Baghdad architect summarizes the majority opinion: “We do not particularly want a U.S. military strike, but we do want a political change. We have nothing to lose, and it cannot be any worse than our current condition.”

Well, I don’t know that it’s possible to do any kind of scientific polling in a police state, but this is certainly at least as valuable as the usual stuff reported from Saddam’s mouthpieces.

UPDATE: Reader Richard Wolf emails:

Do you think Sean Penn is bothering to speak to any of these people, or is he simply getting the Tour For The Useful Idiots?

In the words of a famous psychiatrist, what do you think?

WHAT THE DIXIECRATS BELIEVED: One of Lott’s lamer defenses is that the Thurmond candidacy was about federalism and individual liberty. It’s lame because, well, it’s a lie. Here’s what Dave Kopel has to say:

There were five major sections of the Dixiecrat platform, one of which denounced “proposed FBI powers,” and featured frantic warnings that the Democrats and Republicans both wanted to impose a totalitarian police state. In the platform’s final section, “New Policy,” two of the eight platform items further condemned “the effort to establish nation-wide a police state in this republic.” (The Smoking Gun has an online version of the final section; TSG’s version is from a state convention, and differs in some small ways from the final section of the official platform.)

Now if Senators Thurmond and Lott had adhered to this particular language of the 1948 platform, things might indeed be better in this country. But to the contrary, the Dixiecrat concerns about a police state appear to have existed solely in the context [of] federal efforts to secure civil rights for black people.

Jim Henley, who also has a link to the Dixiecrat platform, observes:

It’s dispiriting to see so much talk of constitutionalism and individual liberty and opposition to enlarging the federal police power – all things that mean a great deal to me – so…befouled by their inclusion in this document, one whose fourth through sixth points make it clear that all those principles meant to them was the power to bring the full weight of state and local police power down on black chests. It’s a theme, the contamination of your beliefs by odious people who hold a version of them, that I’ve had occasion to consider this weekend at length.

One thing alone cheers me up: their patent insincerity about constitutionalism and individual liberty and federal police power. Reading this document, you can be pretty sure that a Thurmond Administration would have enthusiastically swung the power of the federal government toward preserving segregation. You can imagine Thurmond directing J. Edgar Hoover to deal with “outside agitators,” resegregating the army and passing latter-day “fugitive slave” laws to force states outside the region to support southern efforts to retard or reverse civil rights. (Viz. the Dred Scott decision, which, taken to its logical conclusions, would essentially have re-instituted slavery in the antebellum North.)

Thurmond, et al., weren’t friends of federalism or liberty. They were racists who posed as friends of federalism and liberty — and by doing so, brought disregard on the very things they claimed to honor. Much as some other people have done in the name of “equality.”

STEVE SAILER’S DISSING ME, over the Lott affair, though I have to say that his disrespect hasn’t stopped him spamming me with emails in the past in the hopes of getting some attention.

I don’t like Sailer’s stuff, or his VDare.org anti-immigration site for reasons that should be pretty obvious. I’m not surprised that he’s sticking up for Lott. That he’s doing so reflects badly on Sailer. And on Lott.

The good news is that, beyond the fringe, America seems to have outgrown this stuff.

UPDATE: In fairness to Sailer, I have to admit that he’s dead-on in saying that fast typing is the secret to my success. Kids: stay in school, and take typing! Thanks, Mrs. Pack — I owe it all to you.

ANOTHER UPDATE: In response to an email from a reader, no, I don’t think that an opposition to illegal immigration is necessarily racist. And, in fact, legal immigrants are often notable for their hostility to illegal immigration — having jumped through the hoops themselves, they naturally resent those who bypass the hoops entirely.