ONCE AGAIN I’M WIRELESS-BLOGGING FROM THE MELLOW MUSHROOM on campus. The wireless access here is excellent. I’m just a bit early to meet a friend and thought I’d check it out with my new NEC ultralite laptop. I bought it on closeout dirt cheap, using your PayPal donations. (Thanks! And, as you can see, you’re rewarded, if that’s the word, with more blogging!) I don’t think I’d want it as my main computer, or even my main laptop, because it’s little. On the other hand, it weighs 3 pounds, and the screen even works in bright daylight. It’s not quite blogging from a Palm, but it’s awfully damn portable even compared to the Toshiba laptop that I usually use. And as Dave Winer recently observed about cameras, one you have with you is a lot better than one you don’t.

I plan to spend a little time this summer blogging from various wi-fi enabled spots in town. They seem to be springing up like, er, mushrooms.

MICKEY KAUS has responded to my earlier comments on conflicts of interest. He says I’m wrong.

UPDATE: Hmm. But if I’m wrong about conflicts and disclosure, what about this?

On the other hand, Kaus is right when he says that Kurtz was soft on CNN regarding the Eason Jordan debacle. And Kurtz hasn’t said anything about CNN’s scandalous use of phony video in an assault weapons story by John Zarrella. But here’s the kicker: as far as I know, neither have any other Big Media opiners, regardless of their affiliation. (Unless I count, and I don’t think I do.) I think that guild-mindedness and political slant is a much bigger problem for the press than institutional conflicts — and I suspect that that’s one reason why the press spends so much time talking about the latter while piously (and bogusly) claiming freedom from the former.

THE VOLUNTEER TAILGATE PARTY IS OPEN FOR BUSINESS. So is the Indian bloggers’ equivalent, Blog Mela. As far as I know there’s no overlap between the groups (though who knows?) but both like spicy food and good conversation. And blogging!

If you’ve been sticking around the same old sections of the Blogosphere and want to try something different, visit ’em both.

UPDATE: Oops. Somehow I had the wrong link for Blog Mela. It’s fixed now.

“MISSED SIGNALS” AT NASA may have led to the Columbia disaster.

BRITISH CHURCHMEN BACKING MUGABE: Disgraceful.

THE NEW YORK TIMES IS REFUSING TO COOPERATE WITH INVESTIGATORS looking into possible criminal actions by Jayson Blair.

I’m inclined to think that the U.S. Attorney’s interest in the Blair case is grandstanding, and that it represents an abuse of prosecutorial discretion. But even so, I think that Donald Luskin is right to point out the Times’ hypocrisy here:

Can you imagine the stink the Times editorial pages (i.e., the entire paper) would put up if Blair had been an employee of the Bush administration and the White House acted to block an investigation?

Or simply an employee of some other big corporation whose business involves the public trust and welfare, like, say, Enron.

I think that this will get worse for the Times before it gets better. Raines’ initial mea culpa (well, it wasn’t really a mea culpa, was it?) is starting to look more like a “modified limited hangout.”

INDIANA UNIVERSITY LAW STUDENT SCOTT DILLON HAS BEEN INVESTIGATING Indiana University’s claims regarding affirmative action. He says that IU is, to put it politely, misleading the Supreme Court. Now it’s been noticed in the wider world. Add this to claims that the University of Michigan covered up or misrepresented study data that contradict its claims and you’ve got a real issue. I hope that people will get to the bottom of this. I can’t help feeling that we’re seeing a new kind of “massive resistance” on many campuses.

UPDATE: It’s worth reading this confession originally from the Indianapolis Star, too. Excerpt:

Roughly speaking, to meet our de facto quotas, we must leapfrog less qualified minority applicants over approximately 330 more qualified non-minority applicants each year, many of whom, of course, will be Indiana residents. . . .

We differ in that to meet our de facto quota, we regularly lower our usual standards of admission more than our counterparts at Michigan lower theirs. For example, to meet our de facto quota of blacks in each first-year class, we deviate from our usual standards of admission more than any remotely comparable law school is willing to do. In fact, of all the law schools in the country approved by the American Bar Association, none regularly lowers its standards of admission for affirmative action purposes as much as we do. As a result, black applicants whose low grades, LSAT scores and extracurricular record would otherwise win admission only to Howard Law School in Washington, D.C., regularly win admission from us. And the overwhelming majority of applicants — perhaps 80 percent — for whom we lower our standards so drastically are from out of state.

Such is the affirmative action admissions policy we at the IU Bloomington Law School have followed for more than 30 years. We follow a similarly heavy-handed affirmative action policy for financial aid and faculty recruitment.

A policy however well-meaning in the abstract can feel foul to those given the job of implementing it. And in my four years on the admissions committee, routinely leapfrogging minority applicants over so many dramatically more qualified non-minority applicants, foul is how our affirmative action policy came to feel. Seeing the photographs and reading the record and personal statements of non-minority applicants whom we rejected in order to admit the far less qualified left me feeling as though I should wash.

Read the whole thing.

PATRIOT ACT POWERS are being used for non-terrorism purposes. I told you so. Talkleft has a summary, and links.

NANNY-STATISM — in Texas? Yep. Radley Balko has the scoop.

MY NEIGHBOR, BRIAN BELL OF WEEZER, has a new CD out with his other band, Space Twins. You can buy it online — along with cool t-shirts designed by his sister, Lea — here.

(Okay, it’s really his mom who lives next door to me, but he still uses it as his permanent address, and it’s kind of cool to start posts with “my neighbor, Brian Bell of Weezer,” so. . . .)

LILEKS on the Chris Hedges speech:

So why am I spending so much time on it? Perhaps because it’s an old-media / new-media moment, with generational manifestations. (Oooh – that’s enough hyphens and multisyllabic drivel to get me in an academic journal.) Hedges is the embodiment of the Times paradigm – wisdom digested and packaged and handed down to you, the consumer. That’s where it ends. You. If you have a problem with what we’ve said, write us a letter; of the 18745 letters we get every day we will chose fourteen to print in tomorrow’s paper.

The college students in the audience grew up with the internet; they have spent their college years in chatrooms and blogs. Email’s been around since they were in kindergarten. They are wired for instant feedback.

And what do you know, they gave it.

What he said.

REMEMBER AFGHANISTAN? Austin Bay does, and he’s got some observations on developments there, good and bad.

KATE AT ELECTRIC VENOM has some thoughts on terrorist strategy.

YALE BOMBING UPDATE: The Jurist website collects blog posts and news stories into a well-rounded picture. And here’s a special report from the Yale Daily News — made possible via the Web, as the Daily isn’t publishing right now.

Note that Yale Law’s website is down. A temporary site is up at www.yale.edu/law. Exams are proceeding as scheduled in alternate locations. That’s the spirit. If you cancel the exams, the terrorists will have won!

UPDATE: Howard Bashman gets the last word: “I guess this will answer once and for all the accusation that the Yale Law School experience is ‘too theoretical.'”

STEVE VERDON HAS MOVED — to www.SteveVerdon.com, of course.

STEFAN SHARKANSKY HAS MORE ON ROBERT SCHEER, whose work he is comparing to that of Jayson Blair. I’m not sure that’s a fair comparision — Scheer’s a pundit, if a not-very-good one, while Blair was (or pretended to be) a reporter. But you can read the post and see for yourself. Even without the Blair comparisons, the examples of distortion and selective quotation are pretty sad.

REALCLEARPOLITICS points to a passage in this Washington Post story:

The Saudi official said there were at least three al Qaeda cells with about 50 hard-core operatives in the kingdom before the bombings. He acknowledged that there was a much wider circle of sympathizers, and U.S. officials broadly agreed with his analysis.

“We don’t believe there are tens of thousands of active al Qaeda members here, but we believe the al Qaeda presence is more than a single cell or two cells,” a senior U.S. official told reporters today.

As RCP notes, if that’s the scope of the problem, then it’s not much of a problem. But is it?

COLBY COSH:

This, surely, is silver-platter material for a column about modern education. In Jayson Blair we behold the apotheosis of “self-esteem” disconnected from any kind of objective reality. He’ll admit to fraud! He’ll admit to drug abuse! But you’ll have to tear him apart with wild dogs before you get him to admit he’s “unworthy”!

Heh. Read the whole thing.

CHRIS HEDGES UPDATE: Here’s a story on his response, which seems rather far from the “why do they hate us?” that he’s been urging on the United States.

The story also notes that he was paid $5000 for his 18-minute diatribe. That’s roughly $278 / minute. You can listen to the audio yourself and see if you think it was worth it.

Was it uncivilized and improper of the students to shout him down? Yeah. But it was uncivilized and improper of him to subject a captive audience to such bile. He’s lucky they didn’t throw rotten fruit.

But one thing’s clear — thanks to Hedges, the spirit of Abbie Hoffman lives on:

George Kehoe, a 66-year-old father from rural Boone County does not view his reaction as closed-minded. He approached the front of the stage in protest.

He was disturbed, too. Veterans who sacrificed their health were in attendance, Kehoe said.

Kehoe spent more than an hour reading Hedges’ book at a store on Monday night. He didn’t walk out with a purchase.

It’s not quite “steal this book,” but it’s close.

UPDATE: Williams College reader Julianne Shelby emails:

It was rude and uncivilized for the students to shout down Hedges? You must be joking.

I listened to that 18 minute, stale, anti-intellectual heap of contradictory crap. If part of *my* tuition had gone to pay for that smarmy SOB to irrationally rant about the country I love at *my* commencement, without a word about the fact that I was, erm, graduating, I would have considered it a duty to drown him out with insults. The nerve of that man.

As I said, the times, they are a’changin’.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Brian Miller emails:

I have to disagree with your statement that it was uncivilized and improper for the students to shout him down. We’re not talking about a typical situation where a speaker is scheduled to talk about a topic of his/her choosing to an audience that has chosen to attend specifically to hear the ideas being discussed. Rather the situation is almost the reverse… the speaker in this case was invited to attend and speak at an occasion that held special meaning to the audience. To me at least, that is an important distinction.

When people attend an open forum specifically for the purpose of trying to shout down a speaker with whom they disagree, a case might be made for that being uncivilized and/or improper. But in this instance, we have a speaker who appears to have gone out of his way to indulge in baiting his audience on their, not his, special occasion. The notion that people should simply keep their mouths shut and permit others to taint an occasion that holds special significance for them shows just how deeply PCism has rooted itself in our society.

I’m getting a lot of mail like this, especially from students.

THERE HAS BEEN AN EXPLOSION AT YALE LAW SCHOOL:

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — An explosion was reported in a mail room at the Yale University law school, a city spokesman said.

James Foye, a spokesman for Mayor John DeStefano, said he had no immediate information about any injuries.

The FBI in New Haven said members of the agency’s terrorism task force were sent to the scene.

Smoke could be seen rising from downtown.

The incident came as the nation was on elevated alert for possible terrorist attacks and several hours after President Bush — a Yale alumnus — visited the state to speak at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy graduation ceremony in New London.

The Bush connection seems rather unlikely to me. There’s nothing about this at the Kitchen Cabinet or Balkinization sites, and I can’t seem to get Yalepundits to load. But OxBlog has this report:

Anna Skotko writes in to say that the word on the street (literally) is that thankfully so far it seems possible no students were hurt. Someone saw a wall to the alumni reading room collapse, and a few classroom doors were reportedly blown out – but buildings can be rebuilt….

Stay tuned.

UPDATE: The Command Post reports that one floor has collapsed. (But be skeptical of early reports, as always.)

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader suggests that the smoke is probably steam from the cogen plant. I was on the building committee — the campus is riddled with steam tunnels that could rupture. I’m somewhat skeptical about the floor collapse story, as the floors are mostly thick and granite. Perhaps part of one might have collapsed, but even that seems doubtful.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s a later story:

Barbara Safriet, an associate dean at the law school, said fire officials told her that there were no injuries reported, but crews were still checking the building.

New Haven police spokeswoman Bonnie Winchester also said early reports indicated the explosion was in a mail room, and said it might have affected more than one room.

Witnesses reported a loud boom and flying debris shortly before 5 p.m. Police shut down the city block around the law school.

Alexandra Alperovich, a law school student, said she was sitting in the student lounge when she heard the explosion. She saw a wall to the alumni lounge collapse.

“It was very smoky. Everything started falling and I just ran out right away,” she said.

If the Alumni Lounge is the room I think it is (they’ve renamed some of them) it shares a wall with the mailroom.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Sounds like it was actually in a classroom — room 127? — from what they just said on TV. The terror connection seems very doubtful. The obvious explanation, though — a student trying to stop an exam — seems very unlikely at Yale, where people are pretty mellow due to the lack of class rankings and, for all practical purposes, grades.

Lily Malcolm of Kitchen Cabinet (link above) reports: “We are all fine.” I’m relieved. Jack Balkin — link also above — also has a somewhat more detailed report that suggests it might have been an exploding pipe. He says the explosion was in room 120. Oxblog (permalinks not working) has multiple updates.

STILL MORE: This MSNBC report says it was room 120.

MORE YET: A student emailer says there are lockers more or less above room 120 (there weren’t when I was there) and that the explosion might have been in one of them. Who knows? We will, soon enough. I’d be quite surprised to discover that this is terrorism (at least of the Islamo-fascist variety), though.

LawMeme has more.

GOOD NEWS FROM COLORADO: Linda Seebach of the Rocky Mountain News emails:

I thought you would like to know that Gov. Owens’ press secretary just called me to tell me that the governor has vetoed our super-DMCA bill, H.B. 1303. In his veto message he said the bill “could also stifle legal activity by entities all along the high tech spectrum, from manufacturers of communication parts to sellers of communication services.”

He urges the legislature, if it returns to this topic in the next session, “to be more careful in drafting a bill that adds protections that are rightfully needed, but does not paint a broad brush stroke where only a tight line is needed.”

Indeed. Meanwhile Bill Hobbs reports that the Consumer Electronics Association is weighing in against Tennessee’s super-DMCA bill, which hasn’t passed yet and hopefully won’t.

MEDIA MELTDOWN: I tie together all the journalistic scandals, and connect them with the FCC’s discussion of media consolidation, over at GlennReynolds.com.

UPDATE: Well, almost all of them. I left out Chris Hedges. Media Minded has a link to audio of the speech, so you can listen and make up your own mind. Here’s MM’s take:

Think I’m kidding about the Chomskyite content? Listen for yourself. I did, and not once did he even mention the kids who were getting their diplomas that day. There wasn’t even a “as you go out into the world” bit at the end of his rant. It was just pure bile directed at the Bush administration. No wonder he was loudly and heartily booed, and nearly yanked off the stage.

I’m not saying Hedges doesn’t have the right to say what he believes. But I have to wonder about whether it was appropriate to vent his spleen in such a manner at a graduation ceremony. Furthermore, any claims of “objectivity” Hedges may make in his role as a journalist can now be easily dismissed, and all of his reporting from Iraq now comes into question.

What was he thinking?

Was he thinking? What strikes me, on listening to it, is the preachiness, the pompous and sanctimonious tone of his voice, and the way he mangles Reinhold Niebuhr as he recycles old soundbites and factoids as if he were saying something profound. He recycles the looting lies, too. He sounds like a talk-radio caricature of a liberal, and he’s flat-out racist in his dismissal of Arab prospects for democratic self-government. “Iraq was a cesspool for the British. . . it will be a cesspool for us as well.”

Yep. Racist. The Moose says so.

ANOTHER UPDATE: John Tabin has a roundup of commencement stories from around the nation. Seems like there’s a trend here. He adds:

Administrators justify these speeches– and condemn the walk-outs and boos that they are now drawing– by saying that its their job to “challenge” students– but by an amazing coincidence, these “challenging” speakers sure tend to reflect the bias of the administration. Funny how that works.

Funny.

BIASED BBC continues to track the Kampfner/Lynch story. (Hugh Hewitt has the Robert Scheer angle — he says that the L.A. Times isn’t even trying to defend the column. He’s got a column on the subject, too.) Meanwhile Chris Regan points out that Howell Raines blocked a review of Bill McGowan’s book, which argues that diversity crusades are corrupting the news business. And Eugene Volokh has more on the CNN Assault Weapon fake-video story.

SOME USEFUL PERSPECTIVE:

A blog isn’t your friend, it isn’t your life, and it most certainly shouldn’t be the only thing you ever do – it may inspire and spark creativity – but it can also be a destructive illusion – a reality that feeds the worst part of you if you are desperate for it to give something back. All you can really hope for out of a blog is a release, and perhaps to make a connection with another person. If you make only one, that is one more than you had before.

That is all, now go forth and blog with your heart, not with your ass.

For those who don’t buy this, there’s also some advice about how to boost your traffic by marrying Moxie.

Sadly, whenever I try to take a break, I get stuff like this, calling me back.

THIS DOESN’T SOUND VERY DIPLOMATIC TO ME:

Walk the halls of the State Department’s main offices in Washington these days, and you’ll encounter an abundance of political cartoons — something you could not have found even three years ago. It’s not that the diplomats at Foggy Bottom have suddenly developed a sense of humor, but rather a newfound contempt for the leader of the free world. The cartoons overwhelmingly lampoon President Bush as a simpleton who doesn’t understand the “complexities” of the foreign policy.

Foreign Service sneering at a president is nothing new, of course, but such open disrespect for a commander-in-chief hasn’t existed since Foggy Bottom’s diplomats decried Ronald Reagan’s description of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” But at least then-Secretary of State George Schultz was able to keep something of a handle on his lieutenants and foot soldiers. Colin Powell has not.

The result, of course, is the marginalization of the State Department. That’s a bad thing — or it would be, if the State Department had more to offer.

Kamil Zogby isn’t very happy with the State Department, either.