EUGENE VOLOKH has some interesting statistics on education spending and class size today, versus education spending and class size in the 1960s.

TRES PRODUCERS has the explanation for NPR’s conflicted views on Judaism.

NICK DENTON ANNOUNCES his middle east peace plan.

UPDATE: Rishawn Biddle comments. And scroll down to read Paul Craig Roberts’ assessment of Rishawn.

ROBERT MUSIL SAYS THAT Kaus and Sullivan are wrong to write off Krugman. According to Musil, he’s actually getting more balanced.

PEOPLE UNCLEAR ON THE CONCEPT: Just heard the father of Daniel Pearl’s accused kidnapper on NPR. He said that his son was innocent — and, in a rather threatening tone, that more things like that would happen if “the people who are persecuting muslims” don’t stop their persecution.

Oh, yeah, I’m convinced of his innocence now.

FREDRIK NORMAN has an item on more anti-Israel nonsense from Norwegian politicians — and an email address for communicating your sentiments.

SPAIN appears to have arrested another Al Qaeda guy. My sense is that Spain is cooperating rather well in the law-enforcement / intelligence side of the war.

OKAY THIS STORY MAKES ME REALLY MAD. I just found out about it from visiting some Canadian blogs — if it’s been covered in American media much, it must have been on the sports pages, which I generally don’t read:

AUBURN HILLS, Mich. – A crowd of American basketball fans booed O Canada last night before the Detroit Pistons and Toronto Raptors played Game 1 of their first-round NBA playoff series.

When the Canadian anthem was played before the tipoff, it was met with a steady stream of boos from the sold-out crowd.

Among the crowd in this Detroit suburb were several thousand Toronto fans, who were decked out in Raptors gear and waving Canadian flags.

When Toronto, which trailed through almost the entire game, put together a run of points toward the end of the first half, the crowd began chanting: “U.S.A., U.S.A.!”

The anger at Canada might have been fuelled by dismay at the Detroit Red Wings losing the first two games of their NHL playoff series against the Vancouver Canucks.

The guys who did this are world-class assholes, and completely unAmerican in my opinion.

UPDATE: Reader Javier Gonzalez writes:

Don’t overreact. This goes on all the time. I go to hockey games here in Washington against Canadian teams and in the middle of their anthem some guy screams, “Canada sucks!”, and everybody cheers. It goes on all the time and its only a sport. One is not really booing Canada, just trying to psyche out their players. I was reading the Pearl Jam message boards and a Canadian there made the comment that in the Vancouver game against Detroit, Vancouver fans booed the Star-Spangled Banner. I am sure you’ve got some readers from Vancouver or from any of the other six Canadian cities that have NHL teams. Ask them if they heard booing of the Star Spangled Banner at any of their games, particularly during playoff time (four of their teams are in the playoffs).

Uh, if you say so. It sounds pretty rotten to me, though. Maybe I’m just more sensitive to such things nowadays.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Jason Yoder writes:

This sort of thing does happen fairly often, in Canada as well. The shameful thing about the booing is that those of us in Detroit should know better. Most of us watch the Red Wing playoff games on the CBC affiliate in Windsor, which has been consistently running stories and news briefs about the Canadian Forces killed by US friendly fire in Afghanistan. What would normally be considered borderline rivalry behavior is now an insult, and will be gleefully portrayed as that by many Canadian media outlets.

Yeah.

MICKEY KAUS AND ANDREW SULLIVAN both think Paul Krugman has lost it, based on today’s Bush-bashing column.

HERE’S STREAMING AUDIO/VIDEO of a panel at Harvard Law School dealing with terrorism, security, face-recognition, etc. The panel includes Dave Kopel, Gil Garcetti, Marc Rotenberg, etc. (Requires RealPlayer).

THE UNITED STATES wants to give five Canadian snipers the Bronze Star for valor in Afghanistan. The Canadian government demurs. Canadian reader Michael Homburger, who sent this link, comments:

This story is about two different types of Canadians. The first you might call average “Joe’s”, but I’m pretty sure they are far from average, who instill one with pride. The other a bunch of politicians acting in their typically–typical for Canada–nauseating fashion. I think someone once wrote about a “country of giants being ruled by pygmies”, well that would certainly apply here. Wankers!

I’ve gotten a lot of email like this from Canadians lately.

CLUELESS: Jim Romenesko’s MediaNews points to an amusing story. A 4-year-old found what a newspaper reported to be a “conjoined toad”, with two heads, 8 legs, etc.

Er, except that it turns out it was really two toads gettin’ it on rather than an “exotic two-headed mutant.” Well, duh. I mean look at the picture! “It’s just very obvious,” says a biologist quoted in the correction story. Er, yes, it is.

This might fool a 4-year-old, but it shouldn’t fool a newspaper. Perhaps (as with the anti-gun prejudice mentioned just below) we should take this as evidence that modern journalists are leading lives that are a bit too, um, sheltered.

JONATHAN LAST discovers that people who own guns aren’t crazed killers after all! He seems slightly surprised.

It’s not a bad piece, but when you read something like this in a major conservative publication, you realize that the anti-gun folks’ efforts to demonize guns and gunowners have borne some fruit. I suspect that they would have been less successful if journalists today didn’t come from such a comparatively narrow band of the socioeconomic spectrum. Not many BoBos hunt.

THE NOTE (which I would visit a lot more if it had hyperlinks to the stories it discusses — come on guys, get into the 21st century, or at least the late 20th!) raises questions about Al Gore:

Given the venue of his widely covered speech, we wonder how Gore’s Tennessee fence-mending is going, and whether anyone is paying a pollster these days to test such a thing. And what do Volunteer Staters say in focus groups these days about their former Senator? And what will happen to Gore in 2003 if public polls show him still losing the state to Bush?

I haven’t seen any polls, but I also haven’t heard anyone in Tennessee Democratic politics speak of Gore with anything but disdain.

On the other hand, I’ve also seen not one, but two bumperstickers reading “NOT LAMAR.” I have yet to see a single pro-Lamar Alexander sticker.

Actually, I think that’s probably not an “on the other hand” at all: I think that both Al and Lamar are seen around here as has-beens in national politics who aren’t all that popular with the voters at home, either.

ASPARAGIRL isn’t pleased with Germany’s new approach to anti-semitic attacks — encouraging Jews to avoid anything that looks distinctive.

JEFF JARVIS OBSERVES:

We’ll be watching Robert Blake on trial on TV when what we should be watching is Zacarias Moussaoui on the tube — not because it would be entertaining to see this bozo defending himself but because it would project the perfect — that is, perfectly accurate — image of Muslim fanatics as dangerous and demented and just plain stupid. This is why we should have cameras in all courtrooms, to let us see the truth.

Something to that.

And for something completely different, scroll down from this post to read the entertaining story of Jarvis’s hatemail from Bill Cosby. No, really.

READER GEITNER SIMMONS has some thoughts on the French elections:

The French got their jollies last fall poking fun at our Electoral College; a woefully antique bit of political architecture, they argued. Now, however, I’d say Le Pen’s second-place finish demonstrates the questionable construction of France’s party system.

The French system permitted such a gross fragmenting of the national vote that the candidate of the Socialist Party, the country’s dominant political organization, couldn’t even make the traditional presidential runoff. Sure, Jospin bears much of the blame (as he, to his credit, admitted up-front after the results starting coming in). But it’s hard to see how one can avoid pointing a finger at the folly of France’s out-of-control multi-party system.

“Yes, but a multi-democratic system is more democratic! It better reflects the spectrum of views,” answer the American left-liberals advocating for proportional representation and “cumulative voting.” (A particularly illustrative example of that mindset is Lani Guinier’s call for proportional representation and the end of winner-take-all elections in the March 13, 2001, edition of The American Prospect).

But it seems a real stretch to claim that a presidential runoff pitting Jacques Chirac vs. Le Pen can be called a matchup truly reflective of French sentiment. I’m unconvinced that Le Pen’s positions on law and order represent the desire of some French “silent majority” for a crackdown on Arabs living in France’s ghettoes.

Yes, a runoff between two guys who — between them — didn’t get 40% of the vote makes claims that the 2000 U.S. Presidential election was “undemocratic” seem, well, trivial.

DR. FRANK weighs in on British vs. American views of Israel, and on British leftists’ disclaimers that what they’re saying is anti-semitic:

Americans, reading the Guardian, Independent, or New Statesman, tend to find the hostility towards Israel and Jews fairly shocking, if not always actually anti-Semitic. The British lefties think such shock is misplaced. They maintain that Americans are too dumb to see the difference between true anti-Semitism and legitimate criticism of Israel and its policies. . . .

Well, of course criticism of Israel’s policies isn’t the same thing as anti-Semitism; I don’t know of anyone who has ever maintained that it is. But there’s something about the sheer intensity of this hostility and determined ill will that gives pause. I suppose their ideology (broadly speaking, ’68-era Marxism) requires that international conflict be understood in terms of a “sophisticated” analysis of the “underlying structure,” a dichotomy of Oppressor vs. Oppressed in which the only decent thing is to side with The Oppressed and excoriate The Oppressor. . . .

In a way, the British Leftists have the same difficulty: they find America’s lack of hostility towards Israel and the Jews to be utterly unfathomable, and can’t account for it without recourse to conspiracy theories about Jewish control of the media or secret Jewish enclaves in the government. Those who point out that such rhetoric echoes the rhetoric of classic anti-Semitism and thus sounds a bit, well, anti-Semitic, are themselves alleged to be part of the Jewish conspiracy to silence legitimate criticism, which is not necessarily the same as anti-Semitism, etc.

The weird thing is, writers for publications like the New Statesman don’t seem to have any clue that positing Jewish conspiracies isn’t the most convincing way of establishing your bona fides where anti-Semitism is concerned. It sounds, at minimum, a bit “off” to us; it sounds just fine to them. “Come, come, my dear fellow! I say! I was merely stating the simple fact that the Jew lurks in the highest echelons of power and has a stranglehold on the American media, crushing dissent with merciless claws. What’s all the fuss about?”

And why do Americans think this kind of “criticism” sounds anti-Semitic? Real answer: because it kind of does.

The post is much more sophisticated than these excerpts indicate. Read it.

ERIC OLSEN contrasts NPR’s reporting on the middle east with its ongoing series on Yiddish culture and diagnoses a split personality.

BELLESILES UPDATE: The History News Network has an edited version of my op-ed on the reviewers of Michael Bellesiles’ Arming America and their widespread failure to acknowledge their error. I should note that since this originally appeared the Christian Science Monitor — while not retracting its review yet — has run a story on the issue. There’s also a discussion (pretty critical of The Monitor and Bellesiles) on the CSM’s Monitor Talk discussion board.

THE UNITED NATIONS HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION IS ON THE JOB: “The U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva on Friday voted 23-21, with nine abstentions, to invite Cuba to extend greater civil and political rights to its citizens. It also exhorted Cuba to allow a U.N. representative to visit the island — an idea officials here have rejected.” Reader Sean Fitzpatrick wants to know who the 21, and the 9, are.

Who can vote against a resolution for greater civil and political rights? Oh, I have some idea. . . .

NICK DENTON AND MICHAEL LEDEEN agree that the European Left is in trouble. And they even seem to agree to a surprising extent on why. Denton:

French and German establishment politicians are just terrified of their voters. Given the historical record, you can’t blame them. They’re afraid of populism, because they don’t know where it might lead. So they take refuge in the bland and bureaucratic. No wonder 7% [I think he means 17%] of French voters plumped for the huntin’ and fishin’ candidate. Say what you want about American politics – and I intend to – but US politicians are wonderfully responsive to popular concerns.

I didn’t know Le Pen fished. (Insert obligatory frog-gigging joke here.) Meanwhile, from Michael Ledeen:

The suicidal behavior of the French left bespeaks a more profound crisis in the European left and the growing strength of center-right and outright right-wing parties and candidates across the continent. The failure to rally around a single candidate, and the parallel failure to turn out their own voters, shows the extent to which the French Socialists have lost both a compelling political vision for the country and the discipline required to be a winning organization.

UPDATE: Reader Neel Krishnaswami says I misunderstood — Denton’s not talking about Le Pen here:

He’s talking about Jean Saint-Josse, of the “Hunting, Fishing and Tradition Party”, who actually got 4.3% of the votes, not 7%. No, that’s not a joke.

Yep, he’s right, and I should have realized that. I guess it was the 7 that fooled me.

JAMES LILEKS WRITES THE EPITAPH for the anti-globalization movement:

Many of the people at the rally are just kids, and they have no idea what they’re talking about. It’s fun to go to Washington and chant. It’s fun to burn a flag, and it shows what a serious person you are. Serious, and brave! . . . But when the standard, predictable rebellion of pampered college youths becomes compatible with a group that doesn’t just want American changed but wants America dead, then we have a problem.

Or rather, they have a problem. They preach an end to war, but include in their number people who wish to destroy, violently, a democratic nation. They agitate against racism, but include in their number people who wish to exterminate the Jews of Israel. They rage against globalism, but support the work of terrorists who operate in every hemisphere. They are the useful fools who end up on the wrong side of concertina wire a year after the revolution; besotted by their communal self-regard, enchanted by the allure of the flame, they have thrown in their lot with the enemies of civilization. And this will be the death of their cause.

CORSAIR shares some observations based on his experience as a military interrogator.

SUMMARY EXECUTIONS ON THE WEST BANK: Where’s the outcry from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, or Mary Robinson over events like this?

Hours later, three bound Palestinians, apparently suspected informers for Israel, were found dead at the same spot where the car was hit.

Palestinian gunmen shot the suspected collaborators in the head, raising concerns of lawlessness in Palestinian controlled areas as Israeli forces withdraw from the West Bank.

Perhaps Arafat should be held accountable.

Or, if executions by death squads don’t arouse the ire of Mary Robinson, perhaps Israel should form some of its own? After all, it’s been savagely criticized for simply arresting Palestinians suspected of terror, while these acts of undeniable savagery go almost completely uncriticized simply because they don’t (quite) bear the open imprimatur of government sponsorship.

You have to live with the incentive structures you create.