DUDE, WHERE’S MY INTELLECTUAL HONESTY? SpinSanity is all over Michael Moore’s latest book:

Moore’s penchant for conspiracy theories often leads him to stretch the facts or make laughable claims.

Dude, where’s the news in that? Still, read the whole thing.

UPDATE: QandO is fact-checking Maureen Dowd’s column today, which as usual contains anti-Bush “errors.”

Is Dowd too dumb to write a column for the New York Times? Or too dishonest?

TIM BLAIR is also on the antiwar historical-revision beat.

ADVICE FOR CUBS FANS, from Adam Smith: It’s good advice, naturally.

THIS shouldn’t be a big surprise:

Daniel Hamermesh, a professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin, and Amy Parker, one of his students, found that attractive professors consistently outscore their less comely colleagues by a significant margin on student evaluations of teaching. The findings, they say, raise serious questions about the use of student evaluations as a valid measure of teaching quality.

In their study, Mr. Hamermesh and Ms. Parker asked students to look at photographs of 94 professors and rate their beauty. Then they compared those ratings to the average student evaluation scores for the courses taught by those professors. The two found that the professors who had been rated among the most beautiful scored a point higher than those rated least beautiful (that’s a substantial difference, since student evaluations don’t generally vary by much).

Everything’s show business, these days.

I’ve heard female colleagues ascribe comments on their dress in student evaluations to sexism — but I get those comments all the time, and I remember noticing all sorts of trivial things about my professors. They’re right in front of you, day after day, after all.

VIRGINIA POSTREL has an interesting strategy: plugging her tipjar when her local NPR affiliate is rattling its cup.

Hey, why not? I like NPR okay, but there are lots of blogs I like better.

LYING MEDIA LIAR WATCH: Andrew Sullivan is all over Maureen Dowd, Jules Witcover, and others who are busy rewriting history.

WHEN PROTESTERS ATTACK: Evan Coyne Maloney reports. And he’s got video.

It’s more crushing of dissent, in John Ashcroft’s America.

MEGAN MCARDLE looked stunning in the PBS Media Matters special last year. (It seems to have stuck in Kevin Drum’s mind — note to Kevin: she wasn’t blonde, just backlit.) Apparently, that wasn’t a fluke.

WEBB WILDER SAID IT BEST: “You’re never too small to hit the big time.”

But Rob Smith says it pretty well, too.

SQUANDERING THE POWER: I cast my votes in the U.S. News law school ranking survey today. I suppose I should have auctioned them off on eBay instead.

THINGS TO AVOID, if you’re looking for a job as a law professor, Part I:

Sending your resume as an attached file, but one that’s infected with a virus that infects the Appointments Committee Chair’s computer.

THE ARMY IS LEARNING AN IMPORTANT LESSON FROM THE MARINES: Every soldier will be a soldier first, and a truck driver, or tech, or whatever, second.

This seems like a good thing to me, and to Phil Carter, though Carter notes:

The question will be whether Gen. Schoomaker gets the support he needs from the SecDef to make this happen, and whether he can get the authorization/appropriations authority from Congress to do it.

He should, on both counts, if Congress and the SecDef are serious about national defense. And they ought to be.

WHY AM I NOT BLOGGING ABOUT BASEBALL? Because I figure I should leave that to the real experts.

But heck, everyone else is getting into the act. And I mean everyone else.

Well, it is kind of cool seeing the Red Sox do well, even if they are to baseball what Lucy Van Pelt is to football. . . .

JACOB T. LEVY writes on Indian casinos and politics, in The New Republic:

The key point is that Indians are, once again, looking down the barrel of some especially adverse and arbitrary treatment by a political system in which they make up a tiny minority. If I were in their shoes and had some money on hand, I’d probably spend it on political campaigns, too. Wouldn’t you?

My own feeling is that Indian reservations ought to be able to sponsor legal gambling, sell drugs, legalize prostitution, and do most anything else that doesn’t directly menace their neighbors if they want to — though I’ll admit to having at least a notional conflict of interest there. But I’ll also note that if Indian reservations weren’t subject to state regulation, they’d have far less incentive to put money into state politics. And that would be good for everyone, wouldn’t it?

UPDATE: No, sadly, I don’t get money from Indian casinos. I’m just of Native American extraction myself. Never bothered to get a BIA card or anything, but I’d be eligible if I did the paperwork. That’s why I link Indian Country Today over under “Big Media.”

RECALL JACK VALENTI! That’s what Liz Smith says. Where do I sign up?

A SAFE LANDING, for Chinese Taikonaut Yang Liwei.

I TOLD YOU SO: READ THIS, then read this. You’ve been warned. Now what will you do?

RAND SIMBERG HAS TWO COLUMNS ON SPACE: One at National Review Online, saying that the Chinese space program isn’t as ambitious as some of us think, and another, at FoxNews.com, on new commercial space legislation in Congress.

Of the two, I think that the second topic is probably the more important.

DAVID CARR has further thoughts on the risible Rowan Williams, and the future of the Church of England.

TALENT ISN’T REWARDED IN EUROPE, and the brain drain is worsening in the sciences, reports Virginia Postrel.

FAMILY FUN AT THE MACHINE-GUN RANGE:

A little nervous at first, she pulled the trigger with trepidation, squeezing off a round or two. But Emily quickly discovered why the MP5 is loved by the FBI, Delta Force and others. It’s a full-blown submachine gun, but with the kick of a cap gun. With renewed confidence, she quickly expended the rest of her clip and walked off the line with a big grin.

Last year I took the Advanced Con Law seminar to the shooting range, and the MP5 was, indeed, quite popular with the women. The Insta-Wife, however — who learned to field-strip an M60 machine gun back in ROTC — would probably find it wimpy,.

UPDATE: The InstaWife corrects me: she field-stripped an M16. They just let ’em shoot the M60.

PAUL KRUGMAN IS ACTUALLY WRITING ABOUT ECONOMICS, and Megan McArdle calls his column “outstanding.” (Hey, maybe he should try this again!) Krugman’s pretty pessimistic.

I don’t know enough to say. Readers will note that I don’t do much econo-blogging. Krugman makes a persuasive case that there are potential problems, but for my entire adult life economists have been making dire predictions — many direr than Krugman’s — that didn’t come true. Which, of course, doesn’t mean that Krugman’s wrong to be worried this time.

My own sense is that things aren’t that bad, but I don’t trust my own sense on these matters, as I’ve been wrong before. Some years ago, I was in a liquor store when some stockbrokers came in, bought champagne, and went giddily on about how the Dow (then at about 5500) was sure to hit 10,000. “Jeez,” I thought, “we’ve clearly hit the top of the market. Time to get out of stocks and into something stable.” Fortunately, my main investment strategy of sloth laced with inattention intervened and kept me from making an expensively bad move.

So I don’t know. I’d advise people to do what I do, and pursue a low-debt, comparatively low-spending strategy of personal economic conservatism, but if everyone did that, the economy would collapse for sure. . . .

UPDATE: Not everyone is impressed.

AUSTIN BAY has the latest and final installment of his series on prewar intelligence failures and successes up.

I’VE SAID BEFORE that Arnold Schwarzenegger ought to look at how Tennessee’s Democratic Governor, Phil Bredesen, took a polarized state with financial problems and managed to address those problems while earning respect even from the opposition. Go ahead, Arnold — give him a call!

Now Bill Hobbs reports on the state’s growing surplus, so I guess I should say it again. Oh, wait, I just did . . . .

STEPHEN F. HAYES says that Dick Cheney was right about the uncertain nature of links between Saddam and Al Qaeda.