RUTH WISSE writes that it’s okay to be anti-semitic at the UN. And always has been.

EUROPE’S DIRTY SECRET: Widespread governmental corruption at the highest levels, corruption that nobody’s willing to do anything about:

Political corruption is the disease that dares not speak its name. It has become so much a part of public life, in fact, that politicians of every stripe agree not to speak about it. “There’s this incomprehensible, scandalous silence,” says Arnaud Montebourg, a lonely critic in the French Parliament. The cost to taxpayers is incalculable. Corruption steals money from social programs and services. (Bribes, kickbacks and inflated pricing add 5 percent to 30 percent to the cost of public projects, according to various estimates.) It erodes public confidence in government and undermines the legitimacy of political parties and their leaders. Once it was hoped that a new generation of young leaders would emerge to challenge the old way of doing things, and along the way clean up public life. But in fact the problem is only getting worse. Public anger seems to be brewing, especially in Germany and France, where an increasingly disaffected electorate is turning apathetic and showing signs of abandoning the system.

Corruption happens anywhere, of course, but there’s reason to believe that the more the government does, and the more it strays from subjects that people have some ability to oversee (like road-building, police protection, etc.) the worse it gets.

DAN HANSON has this exclusive report on the anti-Le Pen protests. It’s getting ugly.

BILL HERBERT writes about Ted Rall’s figures on Afghan civilian casualties, which make Marc Herold look conservative, and his experience when he asked Rall for documentation. Hmm. Have you noticed you never see Ted Rall and Michael Bellesiles photographed together?

STEALTH LEGISLATION ALERT: About a year ago, Dave Kopel and I wrote about a dumb and unconstitutional effort by New Orleans’ (then) U.S. Attorney and the Drug Enforcement Agency to shut down raves and other musical events by applying the federal “Crackhouse law.” That was declared unconstitutional by the federal district court in New Orleans. But now there’s a new bill in Congress, H. 3782, that’s supposedly aimed at methamphetamine labs. Only it’s really something else:

“Whoever knowingly promotes any rave, dance, music, or other entertainment event, that takes place under circumstances where a promoter knows or reasonably should know that a controlled substance will be used or distributed in violation of federal law or the law of the place where the event is held, shall be fined under Title 18, United States Code, or imprisoned for not more than nine years, or both.”

This is dumb and unconstitutional, too, but that doesn’t mean it won’t cause a lot of trouble. It’s being opposed by the Electronic Music Defense and Education Fund and by DanceSafe.

And, once again, it’s legislation under false pretenses. Hey, here’s an idea: let’s hold members of Congress to the same kinds standards of disclosure about legislation, that they want to hold Enron to with regard to accounting! Book ’em Danno.

LE PEN UPDATE: Sasha Volokh says that the Le Pen election result doesn’t really mean all that much.

Well, at the very least Jospin, who was rather nasty to the United States last fall, is out of the running, and I plan to milk that for whatever enjoyment it can provide.

CORNEL WEST UPDATE: The New Republic says good riddance:

What’s lost on this career track of posturing and self-aggrandizement, of course, is any learned and original and rigorous contribution to human knowledge or human thought. In West’s case, the omission is particularly tragic. The fragile discipline of African American Studies badly needs high standards and serious scholarship. Instead, one of its preeminent practitioners offers tossed-off books, rap CDs, and shallow public disputes over the respect due to him. Congratulations, Princeton. You have your public intellectual.

Ouch.

THE AMERICAN PROSPECT refers to my mention of the Jenin aerial photos and says that small areas of destruction don’t prove the absence of a massacre: “For example, check out this aerial photo of Ground Zero. Gee, look at the rather small area actually destroyed. But of course, that misses the point entirely. A mass grave can be very small indeed.” Well, yeah — though that would be more persuasive if there had been, you know, skyscrapers standing there in Jenin beforehand. . . .

But I wasn’t linking to the photos to disprove a massacre. (The fact that the Guardian/Observer is backpedaling should be far stronger evidence of that). Rather — as I thought the post made clear — I was pointing out that news and TV reports make it look as if all of Jenin was levelled, rather than a couple-of-blocks-square area in the refugee camp that is itself only part of the town. I mean, scroll down and read the post for yourself. Speaking of “missing the point.”

Anyway, if you want Ground Zero analogies — though those hardly seem appropriate for a lot of reasons that should be pretty damned obvious — it’s as if the media gave the impression that all of Manhattan, and perhaps the Outer Boroughs, had been completely wiped out on September 11.

UPDATE: Several readers write to note that it’s not just the TV news folks, pointing out Jimmy Carter’s misleading reference to “the recent destruction of Jenin and other villages,” in his rather fatuous New York Times column from Sunday. The photos certainly disprove that claim, don’t they? But Carter — who seems to have gotten all his information from CNN — certainly seems to have been deceived by the very phenomenon I describe above.

HERE’S AN ARTICLE on the new L.A. Newspaper that Matt Welch and Ken Layne are starting up. Sounds pretty cool to me.

THE INHABITANTS OF the part of Arabia currently ruled by the Saud family are calling for a boycott of American products. Big deal. The entire Arab world is a trivial market, because it’s economically undeveloped and ruled by kleptocrats.

SO WHERE’S THE U.N. COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS when this is happening?

BOB BARTLEY says we need to take European diplomats more seriously. He’s right, I suppose, but they make it so hard!

INVESTING IN SAUDI ARABIA? Andrew Stuttaford says it’s a bad idea:

Such a decision would also be bad business. “Saudi” Arabia is now on the edge of upheaval. Investing there makes about as much sense as buying railway bonds in the Russia of 1916.

Yep.

ANTIGLOBALIST WILLIAM HAWKINS writes that antiglobalists are abandoning the antiglobalization movement because it has morphed into old-fashioned anti-Americanism:

Hundreds demonstrated outside the hotel where AIPAC was meeting, chanting ‘”Stop the killing, stop the crime, Israel out of Palestine” while holding up signs lauding the suicide bombers as “the poor man’s F-16.” The “peace” movement remains a misnomer. It’s not “anti-war,” it’s just on the other side.

It is clear that the demonstrators were not really “anti-globalists” at all. There were calls for the “international community,” the U.N., and even the ICC to curtail the actions of the United States and Israel. This is the old liberal-Left desire for the disarmament of Western nations and the empowerment of “world” institutions to reign over them in the name of the downtrodden elsewhere.

The shift from anti-globalism to anti-Americanism has cost the demonstrators more than just the sympathy of the USBIC. The AFL-CIO — which provided most of the clout in Seattle, has also distanced itself.

Yes, it’s just the way certain folks split the Left back in the 1960s.

STILL WAITING: I still haven’t seen Noam Chomsky or anyone else call Saddam Hussein a baby-killer for completely stopping the export of Iraqi oil, even though the United States has repeatedly been accused of murdering Iraqi children merely for limiting the amount of oil Iraq can export.

Have I missed it?

D.C.’S ANTIGLOBALIZATION PROTESTS: Exterminating the homeless? Decide for yourself.

TONGUE IN CHEEK? Hell, it’s coming out of his ear!

THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY: You start something in the Blogosphere and it spreads quickly. Stephen Green set up his store last week. Now the Sarge has coffee mugs that reflect his own inimitable style.

EVERYBODY’S EMAILING ME this link to aerial photos of Jenin, showing the rather small area actually destroyed.

You can put this down to bias, but I also remember when some friends from New Orleans told me that a hurricane had knocked down exactly one (1) decent-sized tree in the whole city, but that that tree had appeared on every network news show that night as emblematic of the destruction.

See, they may not be biased at all. They may just always misrepresent the facts. . . .

DAVID CARR weighs in on the Le Pen victory, and endorses the Mickey Kaus welfare-state/terrorism connection, adding:

But it isn’t just the Napoleonic welfare-state which is to blame. The post-war political class was shot through with post-colonial guilt and haunted by the horrors of Nazi Germany to the extent where they saw ‘European culture’ as something which had to be curbed, repressed and, preferably, phased out. Europeans were required to open-ended ‘tolerance’ while immigrant communities were required to do quite the opposite. It was an appallingly misconceived and damaging bit of social engineering that may yet have terrible repercussions.

I suspect that Le Pen is getting some protest votes from people who don’t like this.

MICHAEL BELLESILES UPDATE: Here is an article from Friday’s Emory Wheel that says that Bellesiles’ investigation has either moved to a second stage, or has cleared him, since nothing has been heard since the previously announced deadline has passed.

It’s hard for me to see why they’d be staying mum, which they are, if Bellesiles had been cleared.

In the pot-and-kettle department, meanwhile, we have this passage from a recent book review written by Bellesiles:

As many scholars have recently noted, none so ably as Laura Kalman, legal historians have been stuck for too long in “law-office history,” the process, in Reid’s words, of “rummaging through history and picking out bits and pieces to sustain an argument about current law.”

Of course, at least the “bits and pieces” that they cite are generally real, rather than fabricated.

DAVE KOPEL REPORTS that “Americans for Gun Safety” is still making the claim that terrorists are getting their guns from gun shows.

And, presumably, their box-cutters from boxcutter shows. Kopel has a monograph on the subject here. You see a piece of mine on this campaign here. Note that the Violence Policy Center has — months after making the charge about Barrett Rifles — finally provided some evidence, though it comes almost exclusively from anonymous sources, making its credibility rather dubious.

NOMINATIONS FOR THE BLOG BOOK have been posted. I think you’ll see more diversity in the selections than some coder-types claim. I don’t quite understand why they want to include the FoxNews item of mine that they’ve got there, though.

MATT WELCH SEES THE UPSIDE of the French elections.

IMMIGRATION AUCTIONS AND SOCIALIST SPORTS: All sorts of interesting stuff on the new weblog from Steve Kuhn.