LOTS OF BLOGGING ON THE SUPREME COURT’S AFFIRMATIVE ACTION DECISIONS — from rather different perspectives — from Jack Balkin and The Volokh Conspiracy.

THE BAGHDAD BULLETIN is now publishing. (Via Jeff Jarvis).

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES has more on nepotism in Washington today, with this observation:

“Lots of people have children, wives and stuff that work back here,” he said. “It is not as if a lot of cash is changing hands.”

Seeking favors is as old as the Capitol, but the new tendency to come at it from the side — through family members — may be a consequence of campaign-finance reform: As restrictions have tightened on traditional political giving, interest groups have cast about for new ways to ingratiate themselves.

Nothing strikes quite such a personal note as channeling fees or lucrative jobs to relatives — whether the relatives lobby Congress or perform other services. There are no restrictions. Neither House nor Senate rules bar the practice.

At least 17 senators and 11 members of the House have children, spouses or other close relatives who lobby or work as consultants, most in Washington, according to lobbyist reports, financial-disclosure forms and other state and federal records. Many are paid by clients who count on the related lawmaker for support.

Indeed.

SELLING OUT: Radley Balko is looking for advertisers.

THE OIL-TRUST IDEA SEEMS TO BE GATHERING STEAM:

DEAD SEA, Jordan, June 22 — As Iraq began shipping crude oil today for the first time since the start of the war, the U.S. administrator of the country broached the politically sensitive issue of how oil revenue should be spent, proposing that some of the money be shared with Iraqis through a system of dividend payments or a national trust fund to finance public pensions. . . .

Bremer said one option would pay Iraqis annual dividends based on the year’s oil sales, a system used in Alaska. Another option, he said, would be to deposit the oil revenue into a trust fund to create a social security system. Either way, he said in a speech at the conference, “every individual Iraqi would come to understand [that] his or her stake in the country’s economic success was there to see.”

Seems like a good idea to me.

Read this item from Newsday, too.

SPLIT DECISION on affirmative action. Well, that’ll keep it alive as a political issue.

THE NATION’S SCHOOLS GET A “REPORT CARD:” The results are about what you’d expect.

THIS STORY SEEMS SADLY TYPICAL of our Tribunes Of The People:

A United States senator doesn’t go unnoticed when he pulls rank in public. So when populist Democrat Tom Harkin jumped a snaking security line of less exalted passengers at Reagan National Airport on Friday to make his flight home to Iowa, it was only a matter of minutes before someone dropped a dime.

In this case, that someone was Jim Warren, deputy managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, who had just arrived around 10 a.m. when he spotted Harkin flashing his Senate ID at the Midwest Express counter and being escorted past some 200 long-suffering travelers who were waiting to go through security.

Note the miserable self-justifying excuse: “we were more worried about getting the job done for the people of Iowa than about getting a call from a gossip columnist.” Harkin was done voting. He just didn’t want to have to take a later flight home, even though as a member of Congress he gets special treatment in that regard from the airline industry, too. Members of Congress should have to travel like the rest of us — because if they did, it would ensure that the rest of us had a better flying experience.

MARK STEYN ON IRAN:

That’s why the term ”Middle East peace process” is better applied to the region as a whole than to the so-called Palestinian road map. Dignifying the swamp of the West Bank with the name of the entire neighborhood buys into the Arabs’ propaganda that the Palestinian situation is responsible for the wretched nature of the Middle East, rather than the other way round. Looked at the other way round, peace is processing apace, and the chips are all falling George W. Bush’s way. Whatever the defects of post-Taliban Afghanistan, it’s no longer the world’s biggest training camp for Saudi-funded terrorism. Whatever the defects of post-Saddam Iraq, it’s no longer a self-promotion exercise for the ne plus ultra of anti-American Arab strongmen. And, whatever the defects of post-ayatollah Iran, the fall of the prototype Islamic Republic will be a huge setback to the world’s jihadi.

It was Ayatollah Khomeini who successfully grafted a mid-20th century European-style fascist movement onto Islam and made the religion an explicitly political vehicle for anti-Westernism. It was the ayatollah who first bestowed on the United States the title of ”Great Satan.” And it was the ayatollah who insisted that this Islamic revolution had to be taken directly to the infidels–to the embassy hostages, to Salman Rushdie and, ultimately, to America itself. Twenty years ago, there was a minor British pop hit called ”Ayatollah, Don’t Khomeini Closer.” He came too close. And the end of a regime built on his psychosis is good news for Iranians and Westerners alike.

Indeed.

THE TELEGRAPH is standing by its Galloway story. It also notes — as Tapped and others did not — that the same experts who pronounced the Christian Science Monitor’s Galloway documents probable forgeries said that the Telegraph’s documents appeared genuine.

The Guardian adds:

“We were offered the Monitor story before it appeared and we didn’t like the look of it because it involved taking an unknown source on trust,” said Charles Moore, the editor of the Telegraph.

Although the authenticity of the documents may ultimately have to be tested in court, America’s Christian Monitor newspaper, which also alleged he was in the pay of the Saddam regime, said its expert also looked at the Telegraph’s document and judged it to be genuine.

Despite threats of legal action, Mr Galloway has not yet issued a writ against the Telegraph.

“We’ve had a lot of bluster but we haven’t had the writ,” Moore said.

“We feel there are many questions that Mr Galloway hasn’t answered and it’s in his interests to create a general atmosphere in which all accusations against him are lumped together,” he added.

That’s obviously true for Galloway. It’s to the Guardian’s credit that it is distinguishing the two stories.

It remains, of course, an open question which is worse: If Galloway was defending Saddam’s interests because he was being paid off, or if he was doing so out of genuine sympathy for a mass-murdering dictator. Either way, Galloway seems unfit to hold office in a civilized country, and it surprises me that anyone on the left would feel moved to defend him.

MESSAGE TO LILEKS: Got the Epson Photo Stylus 900 printer and installed it over the weekend. Also got some inkjet-printable CD-Rs and DVD+Rs. Not much more expensive than the regular kind. It works fine, and the results look just like commercially produced CDs and DVDs. It even comes with Mac software!

With one of these, and the requisite audio/video you can be a one-man record or movie company. Knock yourself out.

DAVID ADESNIK ANALYZES the WMD / “Bush lied!” claims:

If there still is solid evidence that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons, then Saddam was in material breach of Resolution 1441. Do those words sound strange to you? “Material breach”? “Resolution 1441”?

They should. Because the question everyone is now asking is “Did Bush lie?” rather than “Did the United States have good cause to invade Iraq without the express written consent of the Security Council?

Indeed. Read the whole thing, which suggests that there’s as much spinning going on from self-justifying antiwar revisionists as there ever was from the Bush Administrations.

ANONYMOUS INFORMANTS, people fired for no reason — it’s neo-McCarthyism!

Wayne Jeffrey, a seven-year veteran of the Fall River force, was fired May 29 after an internal investigation, prompted by an unsigned letter that claimed he smoked tobacco at a party.

I blame John Ashcroft.

MULLAHS GONE WILD! I think I’ll pass on the video.

AMERICAN DIGEST IS BACK, after a prolonged absence. Drop by and say hello!

THIS USA TODAY STORY on domestic violence notes new evidence that women are frequently initiators of abuse, and men often the target. That’s not really news, though it’s true that you don’t hear it that much. What interested me was this passage:

Still, the newest findings challenge the feminist belief that “it is men only who cause violence,” says psychologist Deborah Capaldi of the Oregon Social Learning Center. “That is a myth.” . . .

Capaldi and two other female researchers call for a re-evaluation of treatment programs nationwide. Such programs focus on men and ignore women. Men are court-ordered into some type of rehabilitation, and their women are told in support groups or shelters that they had nothing to do with the violence, Capaldi says.

Why, exactly, is it relevant that these researchers are all female? If they were male, would their research be deemed less trustworthy?

IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH U.S. PRESSURE, we’re told, but Belgium is climbing down and amending its war-crimes law, limiting its application to citizens and residents of Belgium.

Score one for Rumsfeld.

HERE’S A CBC PRESENTATION on the Congo. I haven’t watched/listened to the whole thing, but the parts I sampled were quite good. (Via Jeff Jarvis).

LT SMASH has some thoughts on how things are going that are worth reading.