TIM NOAH is hot on the trail of my old law professor Stephen Carter, regarding his abstention from the Kass Council report.

Carter’s not talking, and Noah — rather unfairly in my opinion — suggests that Carter dropped out to promote his novel. I suspect this is an effort to provoke Carter into returning Noah’s calls, rather than a serious accusation. My guess is that Carter agreed to serve on the panel, then gave up when it was obvious that the Bush Administration had already made up its mind anyway, without waiting to hear what the Council had to say. But that’s just a guess, as I haven’t spoken to Carter about it.

WHAT A BASEBALL STRIKE MIGHT MEAN for the midterm election. This isn’t something I’ve thought about. But Todd Wiener has been pondering.

BELLESILES UPDATE: One of Michael Bellesiles’ contentions was that guns at the time of the American Revolution were too expensive for individuals to own, and hence rare. But here’s what Joyce Malcolm says, in her book, Guns and Violence: The English Experience, about the situation in England, a hundred years earlier (p. 49):

Coule Englishmen afford firearms?. . . By 1658, during the Commonwealth, the price had decreased to 11 shillings a musket, and in 1664 the government considered offering 10 shillings per musket to citizens who turned in serviceable weapons. . . . Used guns were, of course, less expensive. In 1628, when a new pair of pistols cost two pounds, a stolen handgun was valued at only 3 shillings. But the clearest evidence of the widespread ownership of weapons comes from court records. Indictments for misuse of firearms reveal an amazing array of persons of humble occupation — labourers, wheelwrights, bricklayers, carpenters, weavers, blacksmiths, farmers, and servants of both sexes — who appeared before the courts charged with misusing firearms.

Just a reminder to those who continue to claim that Bellesiles just got a few numbers wrong in a handful of paragraphs. Actually, his book is shot through with errors.

Emory, meanwhile, still isn’t talking about what its investigation of Bellesiles has revealed. I imagine that if it had produced an exoneration, we probably would have heard about it by now. But rumors are swirling. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: A reader asks why figures for firearms availability in 17th century Britain mean anything regarding 18th century America. Well, firearms prices tended to decline over time, but more importantly 18th century Americans were considerably richer than 17th century Brits, and had more reason to own firearms. So an argument that firearms were rare and expensive in 18th century America seems even less plausible in the face of evidence that they were cheap and plentiful in 17th century Britain.

PATRICK NIELSEN HAYDEN IS BACK, with new posts on Electrolite. First Adil Farooq, then Matt Welch and Ken Layne. Now this.

The Blogosphere is reconstituting itself. Something big must be in the wind.

UPDATE: It must be: Lileks is back, too!

ISNTAPUNDIT is writing about the romance of stripmining. No, really.

HERE’S MORE ON THE FBI’S ATROCIOUS CONDUCT IN BOSTON, where an innocent man spent nearly 30 years in prison (actually 3 others were wrongly convicted, but one of them died in prison, so he spent less time there. . . .) after being fingered by an FBI informant — who the FBI knew was lying.

These guys aren’t up to Homeland Security. We’d better win this war abroad.

(Link via Bill Quick).

UPDATE: Matthew Yglesias agrees, more or less, and recommends this article by Josh Marshall on the not-ready-for-primetime character of the FBI and Homeland Security in general. (And I don’t find his new blog design as hard to read as some, but then I’m looking at it on a super-crisp flatscreen display.)

ARAB-AMERICANS ARE writing off the West Bank, according to this report in the New York Times. My brother, who sent this link to me, asks, “When was the last time you saw an image of the West Bank that looked like the one in this story?”

That would be never.

SUSANNA CORNETT points out this piece by Don Kates over at History News Network concerning guns and violence. It’s worth a read. I’m currently reading Joyce Malcolm’s new book, Guns and Violence: The English Experience, (prior link is to the Harvard University Press description; Amazon page with reviews is here), which I’m finding quite interesting, though I’ve only made it to the fifteenth century so far.

An interesting gun-related observation: The special Bill-of-Rights symposium issue of Duke’s Law and Contemporary Problems journal is out. The issue was solicited and edited by the American Bar Association’s Section on Individual Rights and Responsibilities. The ABA is pretty darn anti-gun, but the two pieces on the Second Amendment (one by Yale’s Akhil Amar, one by yours truly and Brannon Denning) support an individual-right approach. That’s where the scholarship has gone, despite continuing massive denial by groups like the Violence Policy Center and the Brady Campaign.

The articles will be up on the web sometime next week, I’m promised. I’ll provide links then.

GAY POLITICAL RASHOMON: An interesting difference in perspectives regarding the same event, pointed out by Steve Miller.

SUMAN PALIT has identified a dangerous new religion whose fanatical devotees target the impoverished third world.

TIM BLAIR MAY HAVE IDENTIFIED THE THREAT, but these noble citizen volunteers have self-organized to meet it.

Who needs a Department of Homeland Security?

GEORGE W. BUSH is 5.41 percent smarter than he was this morning.

Isn’t he? Because when the market went down, he suddenly became dumber. Or so I recall.

ART LEFF LIVES, in the quotation at the top of Robert Prather’s weblog.

MATT WELCH SAYS: “Glenn’s ideological promiscuity is actually a key to his popularity.” Promiscuity and popularity do go together, don’t they?

BIDEN ALERT: I’m really starting to dislike Joe Biden, even if I did defend him in the whole plagiarism thing. First it was the stupid RAVE Act. Now he’s sponsoring yet another corporate-whoring entertainment industry bill that would make legal conduct illegal for the better enrichment of Big Media:

Biden’s new bill would make it a federal felony to try and trick certain types of devices into playing your music or running your computer program. Breaking this law–even if it’s to share music by your own garage band–could land you in prison for up to five years. And that’s not counting the civil penalties of up to $25,000 per offense.

“Say I’ve got an MP3 collection and I buy a new nifty player from Microsoft that only plays watermarked content, and I forge the watermark to allow my legal MP3 collection to play,” says Jessica Litman, who teaches intellectual property law at Wayne State University. “It is certainly the case that if I pass that around, I could be trafficking (in violation of the law).”

This proves something I’ve been saying for a long time. These legislative initiatives aren’t just about copyright. They’re about building a regime that’s hostile to content that comes from anyone other than Big Media suppliers. That’s because their real fear isn’t copied Britney Spears CDs — it’s that people will abandon the crap they’re selling for works by independent artists, and cut out the middlemen. And the Democrats are carrying the industry’s water on this.

How can they even pretend to be protecting people from Evil Big Corporations when they’re actually serving as those corporations’ paid lackeys?

Hypocritically, that’s how.

DELLWATCH: Dell seems to be on the ball with my problem now (we’ll see what happens tomorrow) but I kind of suspect that it’s because I’ve been hammering them here, and that your results may differ.

The Greenehouse reports that Clark Howard was hammering them on his show Friday, saying that their consumer service has gone through the floor.

MAJOR BONER AT WESTWORD: And I’m not talking about Dan Savage’s plug for the “tighty-whities” contest. Westword has a lengthy article on Neo-Nazis and a group (“Anti-Racist Action,” or ARA) that tries to disrupt them. While (as regular readers of InstaPundit know) I have an Indiana Jones attitude toward Nazis (“Nazis; I hate those guys”) the ARA isn’t as admirable as the article makes it sound. It’s an anarchist group that until recently sold bumperstickers reading “I [image of gun] COPS.”

Furthermore, the article says:

Whenever Nazi skinheads try to gather in this country, Anti-Racist Action protesters try to stop them, often with the assistance of national hate-group monitoring organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, which share intelligence with local ARA chapters in cities where white-power events are scheduled.

I know someone at the ADL who says this is false, and that ADL does not cooperate with the ARA. In fact he expresses considerable distaste for the group.

SONY HAS LOST a copyright action in Australia in which it tried to bar users from modifying Playstations to let them play imported or modified games.

It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it, that these “copyright” suits aren’t about, you know, protecting original content. They’re just about forcing users to act the way companies like Sony want.

Here’s an interesting treatment of what’s going on.

AMERICAN VS. EUROPEAN TOURISTS: Ted Barlow and Megan McArdle have been having fun with this. I agree with Ted that this quote from Megan is a gem:

And second of all, Europeans get no sympathy from me because I have never, ever seen an American, upon finding out that someone to whom they were speaking hailed from another country, say, “Oh, I hate your country!” and regale the guest to our shores with a half-hour litany of why the foreigner’s country, culture, and customs are utterly repulsive. Yet I have not only repeatedly met with this treatment on each of my trips to Europe, but also found, when I repeated them to a native of whatever country I was in, that my putative host defended this behavior with some variation on “Well, you have to admit they’re right.”

Lovely.