FISKING A WOULD-BE FISKER OF FISKING? Sometimes the Blogosphere really does get a bit self-referential.

RAZIB K SAYS WE’RE CONDUCTING A GIANT SOCIAL EXPERIMENT the likes of which have never been attempted before. So far, so good, as best I can tell.

ROSENBERG ON “that other Senator Schumer” and what he apparently believes.

Hey, maybe Schumer is another victim of a Tikkun-like campaign to discredit him!

TIKKUN IS REPORTING that someone is sending out emails in their name designed to make them look stupid. Rishawn Biddle has more, but without the snarky comments that this seems to call for.

THE REAL TORRICELLI SCANDAL, according to John Cole.

READER TUCKER GOODRICH WRITES:

Let’s review: The record companies complain to Congress that their revenues are down because people are stealing music from them. Meanwhile, they’re no longer allowed to fix prices.

Could it be that’s the reason revenues are down? No more price fixing allowed? The whole piracy thing is a just a lie to coverup a revenue decline? Nah, they’d never do that.

The amazing thing is that revenues weren’t down more…

Interesting observation.

JAMES LILEKS DISSES JESSE VENTURA AND CASTRO SUCKUPISM GENERALLY:

But the Castro-worship just fascinates me. Why? Some applaud the way he thumbs his nose at the US, which always strikes a certain crowd as the hallmark of integrity; if you wrap your derision in the big red flag you’ll always have a claque of bootlickers eager to excuse whatever you do. (The enemy of my enemy is my President for Life.) . . . .

My favorite defense, though, is “free health care” and “literacy.”

Take the second one first. There’s no excuse for not being literate in America. Oh, we could impose literacy on the illiterate here, but it wouldn’t be pretty. We could make English proficiency a requirement for jobs, institute nationwide standards for graduation that mandated a high degree of literacy – and made the students’ fulfillment of those standards a criterion for advancement in the educational establishment.

Let us pause to cogitate how well that would go over.

Health care: supposedly, it’s universal; supposedly, it’s high quality. Egalitarian. (muffled laugh.) Ask yourself this. You’re poor. You have a heart attack. Do you want to be in Havana or New York? Which phone system summons the EMTs faster? Which emergency response team is better equipped? Which hospital is better staffed with highly-paid doctors who have come from all over the world to work here?

Somehow I suspect that a heart attack in Havana at 3 AM means bundling Uncle Raul into your block captain’s ‘57 Belair and hoping it doesn’t break down before you get to the hospital.

But let’s assume that health care in Cuba is the equal of health care in America. If this is the reason to admire Cuba, then this is what some American citizens believe is more important than anything else. Free health care. They will give up elections, the free press, the freedom to travel, the freedom to dissent, the freedom to own a personal computer, for heaven’s sake – they’ve been banned for personal use. But for some, all of those freedoms are negotiable. They’ll give it all up for free health care. That’s their price. . . .

The same people who lecture me about the dark reign of oppression Bush, Cheney and Ashcroft are wreaking on the land are often the same who’d love to meet Castro. They pride themselves on being the champions of freedom, but they celebrate a man whose hands hold the reins of power so tightly they’ll have to saw them off at the wrist when he dies.

Oh, hell, read it all before I wind up excerpting the whole thing. That’s what I hate about Lileks. You excerpt a sentence or two because they’re gems, then you notice that the next sentence or two are gems, too, and then, well, the game’s over, you might as well just give up.

ALTERMAN’S GONNA LOVE THIS: A potential replacement for The Torch.

I STILL CAN’T GET OVER having the Tennessee Attorney General’s office refer me to BlogCritics for more information.

THE EUROPEANS WOULD HAVE MORE CREDIBILITY ON SANCTIONS if it weren’t for things like this:

In response to the increasingly dictatorial nature of the Zimbabwe regime, the European Union early this year enacted a number of sanctions against Zimbabwe, including a ban on travel by members of Zimbabwe’s government.

But, of course, they didn’t mean it. This month Zimbabwe’s Trade Minister was allowed to travel to Brussels, Belgium — which houses the headquarters for the European Union — for a series of talks related to issues in developing nations (previously Zimbabwean officials made trips to France and Italy).

Striking the right pose is what matters. Results are for those crass Americans.

IOWA BLOGGER DAVID HOGBERG says that TAPPED has the Harkin scandal all wrong.

HOW TO CRITICIZE ISRAEL WITHOUT BEING ANTI-SEMITIC: Mike Silverman observes that a lot of people seem to need help in this department, and generously offers some advice.

WELL, I GUESS WE ALL SAW THIS COMING.

UPDATE: Heh. Pretty interesting in conjunction with this speculation. . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Oh noooo. . .

THE AMERICAN PROSPECT IS all over the antiglobalization protests, and they don’t like them much.

TORRICELLI MAY DROP OUT OF THE RACE, according to an AP report.

PORPHYROGENITUS is unfazed by the comments of Bonior and McDermott.

THE COMICS JOURNAL is critiquing Ted Rall and his “web of half-truths.” His cartoons suck, too.

There’s a discussion here. Rall’s already playing martyr.

DANIEL DREZNER has a long rant about U.S. foreign economic policy: “If our national security strategy is devoted to the building up of weak states into open economies with strong governments, our foreign economic policy seems designed to thwart that goal at every significant opportunity.”

NOTE: The University is having major Internet problems, and my access is intermittent. So response to emails, etc., may be delayed.

BIG NEWS ON THE RECORD-COMPANY PRICE-FIXING FRONT: Here’s a press release I just got by email from the Tennessee Attorney General. It’s not on their website yet, (UPDATE: Now it is) as far as I can tell:

TENNESSEE ATTORNEY GENERAL WINS ANTITRUST SETTLEMENT IN LAWSUIT ALLEGING PRICING CONSPIRACY ON MUSIC CDS

Tennessee Attorney General Paul G. Summers announced today that five of the largest U.S. distributors of pre-recorded music CDs and three large retailers agreed to pay millions of dollars in cash and free CDs as part of an agreement on price-fixing allegations.

The companies will pay $67,375,000 in cash, provide $75,500,000 worth of music CDs, and not engage in sales practices that allegedly led to artificially high retail prices for music CDs and reduced retail competition as part of the agreement. Tennessee’s share is an estimated $993,948 in cash and $1,507,852 in CDs.

“The lawsuit and settlement demonstrate our commitment to halting corporate misconduct,” Attorney General Summers said. “Such illegal activity causes our citizens to pay higher prices and distorts our free market economy.”

Tennessee, along with 41 other states and three territories filed an antitrust lawsuit in federal court in August, 2000. The lawsuit alleged the five music distributors (including their affiliated labels) and three large music retailers entered into illegal conspiracies to raise the price of pre-recorded music to consumers. The defendants in the lawsuit are music distributors Bertelsmann Music Group, Inc., EMI Music Distribution, Warner-Elektra-Atlantic Corporation, Sony Music Entertainment, Inc., Universal Music Group and national retail chains Transworld Entertainment Corporation, Tower Records, and Musicland Stores Corporation. The defendants deny these allegations.

You bet they do. I suspect that this is just scratching the surface. Can you say RICO? And where’s the United States Department of Justice on this issue?

UPDATE: Well, this makes being wrong worth it: The Tennessee Attorney General’s office emails me to note that actually the feds were on the case first — and, get this, refers me to this post on Blogcritics for more information on the subject. Is that cool, or what?

HESIOD THEOGENY THINKS I’VE “finally figure[d] it out,” but actually he’s the one behind the curve, as this entry from last December illustrates (“Radiological scam artists — freedom’s first line of defense!”). Don’t teach your grandpa to suck eggs, Hesi.

VIRGINIA POSTREL ADVISES ME to “mention the tipjar more.” Okay. It’s over there on the left.

N.Z. BEAR thinks he’s figured out another instance of rope-a-dope on inspections. Interesting. Michiel Visser isn’t so sure.

CATHY YOUNG DEFENDS HARVARD PRESIDENT LARRY SUMMERS and notes the antisemitism that more and more marks the “peace” movement:

Anti-Israel commentary in Europe not only winks at this virulent anti-Semitism (and refuses to consider it as the context for Israel’s actions) but sometimes stoops to hateful language of its own. British poet and Oxford professor Tom Paulin has said that American-born Jewish settlers on the West Bank ”should be shot dead.” Sometimes, this rhetoric unabashedly substitutes the term ”Jews” for ”Israelis” or ”Zionists.”

Even on college campuses in the United States, the anti-Jewish ”blood libel” has resurfaced in posters of cans labeled ”Palestinian children meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license.” . . .

Whether anti-Semitism plays a central role in hostility toward Israel (especially in Europe) is a complicated question. Sympathy for the Palestinian struggle – even when it takes the form of violence targeting civilians – stems largely from the knee-jerk instinct to romanticize the ”wretched of the earth,” the ”oppressed” of the Third World. Perhaps, too, as Rosenbaum argues, demonizing Israel is partly a way to assuage Europe’s collective guilt over letting the Holocaust happen. And some may use Israel-bashing as a respectable smokescreen for socially unacceptable anti-Semitic bias.

But ultimately, motives matter less than consequences. ”Traditional” anti-Semitism, too, often involved motives other than simple hostility toward Jews as Jews – including anticapitalism, since the Jews were seen as the epitome of the money-grubbing bourgeoisie. For whatever reason, extremist anti-Israeli rhetoric today has become, all too often, a vehicle for the kind of Jew-bashing that one might have hoped was extinct in the civilized world. For drawing attention to this issue, Summers deserves praise.

Also writing in the Globe, Robert Leikind makes a similar point:

When the United Nations hosted the Third World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, last year, the world community had an opportunity to address the hatred that afflicts hundreds of millions of people. Instead, the conference focused almost exclusively on allegations of Israeli wrongdoing. When protesters compared Israelis to Nazis and called for the killing of Jews, the silence from all but a few delegates made it evident that anti-Semitism was losing its capacity to evoke outrage.

Since then, that dynamic has repeated itself many times. It has three elements. First, in the name of ”human rights” or ”justice,” advocates decry Israeli actions, while also depriving them of any context. In their view, Israelis are wanton occupiers, who violate Palestinians’ rights and impose cruel conditions on a subject population. The fact that the occupation is a product of a relentless, half-century campaign to destroy Israel, that Israelis have sustained thousands of casualties from terrorism and are involved in a desperate effort to save the lives of their citizens, or that the Palestinians and many of Israel’s other neighbors continue to foment a hatred of Israel and Jews that serves as a solid barrier against efforts to arrive at a just and lasting settlement, seldom enters into their narrative. It is this absence of balance, not the criticisms (which sometimes may be warranted), that has been so troubling. . . .

Evidence is mounting that demonization of Jews is gaining respectability and that the struggle in the Middle East is providing cover for the expression of such hatred. This does not justify reflexively labeling all criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic. It does, however, compel us to ask why some critics seem interested in investing all their moral capital in attacking embattled, democratic Israel. Asking this question is not intended to chill honest debate. It is intended to create it.

(Via Jay Fitzgerald).

UPDATE: Here’s more from the Harvard Crimson.

HOWARD KURTZ REPORTS some complications in the Peretz / Gore relationship. Peretz apparently “advised” Gore on the speech, even though The New Republic editorialized quite harshly against it.

Hmm. Of course, maybe the Gore people didn’t take Peretz’s advice, which would explain why Peretz is so “uncharacteristically tight-lipped” on the subject.

James Robbins, meanwhile, writes in NRO that the speech was “superb.” No, really:

The most immediate intra-party effect of the speech is to make other Democratic leaders look weak, vacillating, and prone to compromise principles for political expediency. This is an important objective, because these are Gore’s likely opponents in the 2004 primary race. Gore has to separate himself from the pack, and make himself relevant despite the fact that he is a private citizen and has no direct input in the policy or legislative arenas. Opposing the president’s war agenda is the best tool available.

Call it reverse-triangulation. For Clinton, this would work. For Gore, I don’t think so. Mark Steyn, meanwhile, isn’t as impressed with the speech as Robbins.