MOUNT RAINIER: A “monumental threat.” And how. If it — or a few other western volcanoes — ever lets go, the results will be catastrophic. And, sooner or later, they will.

I WAS ON THE HUGH HEWITT SHOW a little while ago, but he didn’t ask the questions I most feared: “Is the recall good? Is it good that Arnold Schwarzenegger is running?”

As to the first, well, I have to disagree with George Will, who disapproves of the recall’s “plebiscitary cynicism,” and says that real conservatives will vote against recalling Davis. That seems wrong to me. California’s voters put the recall into the state constitution and kept it there. Presumably, they like it. It may or may not be a good idea, but it seems a bit odd to say that the time for the voters to act against the recall petition is once it’s triggered. And if the California Constitution is to be recast in less plebiscitary terms — which wouldn’t be a bad thing, overall — what better way to bring the political class onboard with the project than by ejecting the epitome of the political class, Gray Davis?

At any rate, as I wrote in a law review article called Is Democracy Like Sex? (which inspired a column by Will back in 1995 when it came out), voting doesn’t have to make sense to benefit the body politic. In the article, I used a biological metaphor: Many evolutionary biologists believe that sex evolved, despite its cumbersome and expensive characteristics, because it jumbled up genes in a way that made their holders more resistant to parasites over time. (Read the article for a more elegant explanation).

If one looks at special interest groups as parasites on the body politic — as, I think, we probably should — then electoral politics has the effect of shaking up the cozy relationships between politicians and clients, and keeping society more open. (And under Davis, those relationships have been extra-cozy). This disruption of what economist Mancur Olson called the “web of special interests” may be very important way of keeping societies from ossifying. What’s more, it works even if (perhaps especially if) the voters occasionally act irrationally or unpredictably.

Is this what’s going on in California? It looks that way from here. So is the recall a good thing? Probably so.

What about Arnold? Well, he’s bound to be a better Governor than Davis if he gets the chance. Would he be better than, say, Bill Simon or Dick Riordan — or, hell, Cruz Bustamante? I don’t know. He will, however, bring a lot of voters to the polls who don’t usually vote, which I suspect will tend to amplify the anti-special-interest effects I mention above. So whether he ought to be Governor, I think it’s probably a good thing that he’s a candidate.

In his column about my article, George Will wrote: “Is democracy like sex? Surely not. If it were, more people would vote.” Democracy may not be like sex. But Schwarzenegger’s candidacy is making it sexy. And perhaps that’s close enough.

UPDATE: Howard Owens says that George Will is right, and I’m wrong. He adds: “Glenn’s point about California voters long ago approving the recall, never doing away with the recall, and approving the recall does not address the principle argument that the recall is against conservative doctrine.” Hmm. Well, I’m not a conservative, of course, but what about all that respect-for-long-established-traditions-even-if-they-seem-a-bit-irrational-now stuff? I thought that was part of conservatism.

HIT MY TIPJAR! Or who knows what I might be forced to do.

Hell, it’s honest work.

HERE’S ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER’S CAMPAIGN WEBSITE. But where’s the campaign blog? They’re de rigeur nowadays. On the other hand, he’s already got an online contribution button, so he’s halfway there. . . .

LARISA isn’t persuaded that servants make good cultural ambassadors.

I always felt that girlfriends did better at that. But of course, that was when I was single.

IT’S BLOGCRITICS’ FIRST ANNIVERSARY. I have to say, it’s done better than I ever expected, and become a rather respected source of Web reviews. Bravo!

GIVE HOMELAND SECURITY SOME CREDIT for this one, assuming it pans out as reported:

A British national was arrested this morning on suspicion of being involved in a plot to smuggle surface-to-air missiles into the United States, ABCNEWS has learned. . . .

Sources said the man, possibly of Indian descent, thought he was dealing with terrorists in the United States who wanted to shoot down a passenger jet.

The man was arrested in Newark, N.J., as part of an international sting conducted by the FBI, British and Russian authorities. The sting began five months ago in Moscow.

Hmm. According to this BBC report, this was a pure sting, with no actual terrorists involved. If all is as reported, it can hardly be called entrapment. It should, of course, have the effect of making other people less willing to deal with terrorists, real or otherwise, under these circumstances, which is the point.

PHIL CARTER WRITES that Paul Krugman is paying too much attention to David Hackworth.

UPDATE: Here’s more.

THE OFFICE OF CIVIL RIGHTS AT THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION is making clear that civil rights laws don’t support speech codes on campus:

Some colleges and universities have interpreted OCR’s prohibition of “harassment” as encompassing all offensive speech regarding sex, disability, race or other classifications. Harassment, however, to be prohibited by the statutes within OCR’s jurisdiction, must include something beyond the mere expression of views, words, symbols or thoughts that some person finds offensive. Under OCR’s standard, the conduct must also be considered sufficiently serious to deny or limit a student’s ability to participate in or benefit from the educational program. Thus, OCR’s standards require that the conduct be evaluated from the perspective of a reasonable person in the alleged victim’s position, considering all the circumstances, including the alleged victim’s age.

There has been some confusion arising from the fact that OCR’s regulations are enforced against private institutions that receive federal-funds. Because the First Amendment normally does not bind private institutions, some have erroneously assumed that OCR’s regulations apply to private federal-funds recipients without the constitutional limitations imposed on public institutions. OCR’s regulations should not be interpreted in ways that would lead to the suppression of protected speech on public or private campuses.

This should be obvious, but it’s nice to have them on the record this way. (Via F.I.R.E. — and note that the author of the OCR memo, Gerald Reynolds, is no relation.) F.I.R.E.’s press release is here.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh says the letter isn’t as good as it looks. I defer to his superior knowledge of this subject.

I AGREE WITH JEFF JARVIS: FoxNews’ suit against Al Franken is asinine.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh adds: “it seems to me like a really silly move on Fox’s part, since it looks like a heavy-handed and legally ill-founded attempt to suppress criticism.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Alex Knapp says Fox is right. Well, sort of. I don’t think so, on these facts. But I’m not a trademark lawyer.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Ralph Luker:

I do think someone should sue Franken for posing as a comedian. They haven’t pronounced on that issue. Where’s the outrage?

Now there’s a slam-dunk case. He hasn’t been funny since the “Al Franken decade,” — which was rather a long time ago.

STILL MORE: Kim du Toit:

[What] the Fox lawyers should be doing is looking for loopholes in Geraldo Rivera’s employment contract, instead of giving alleged humorist Stuart Little Al Franken free publicity.

Geraldo who?

FACTOID OF THE DAY: Bill Quick looks at the death toll from the Paris heat wave and remarks: “Why, that’s almost twice as many as the number of US troops killed in Iraq. Send in the UN!”

It’s the “brutal Parisian summer.” Did Robert Fisk warn us about that?

UPDATE: A couple of readers seem to think I’m gloating at the fact that people in Paris are dying from the heat. No. I just think it brings a little perspective to the — genuine — gloating we’re seeing from some antiwar folks about “massive” U.S. casualties.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The “peace” movement chides me for incivility:

No, it’s all about *your* gloating.

And the fact that an asshole like yourself could give a shit about how many Americans get their brains blown out as long as you can sit at home in front of your computer and disseminate the chickenhawk spin.

Piss off, moronic brownshirt fuck.

Quite sincerely,

Dave Abston

Typical.

I’M NOT SURE, but Adam at Throwing Things might just be the first blogger to receive press credentials at a Presidential campaign event solely on the basis of having a blog.

UPDATE: Nope. Dave Roberts emails: “Daily Kos and My DD both got press passes to the California Democratic Party annual meeting where the presidential candidates gave their speeches in mid March.” Here’s a link to the Kos account.

GIZMODO observes:

With Terminator 3 having just come out a few weeks ago, maybe it wasn’t the best time for the Defense Department to unveil Project Alpha, which is charged with figuring out how the US military can develop armies of autonomous robots by the year 2025.

Advice to the Pentagon: If you want to make war robots look good, encourage someone to make a movie based on Keith Laumer’s Bolo stories. His warbots seem more human than Arnold does when he’s not playing a Terminator.

BILL HOBBS NOTES that some people are proposing Al Gore as a candidate for President — of the University of Tennessee. He wonders what I think. Actually, this is a subject that I weighed in on almost exactly two years ago.

MICHAEL BARONE HAS SOME THOUGHTS on what a Schwarzenegger victory would mean for the political scene in California — and elsewhere.

AFRICA DOESN’T GET ENOUGH ATTENTION, but this regional briefing by AfricaPundit over at Winds of Change has a lot of stories you probably missed.

UPDATE: Here’s a blog focused on Zimbabwe and Southern Africa. I haven’t looked at it very closely, but it appears to have a lot of useful links.

STEVEN DEN BESTE has some interesting thoughts on hard vs. soft power. Of course, to a degree the two go together.

THE SPLIT ON THE SIXTH CIRCUIT COURT OF APPEALS has made the New York Times. I can’t vouch for the details, but the rift was widening when I clerked there in the 1980s, and I think it’s grown steadily wider ever since. Nothing on this yet from the Sixth Circuit Blog, but I’ll be looking forward to his analysis.

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST ON THE 9/11 COMMISSION: Tom Maguire looks at the timeline, and concludes that Jamie Gorelick’s position is even worse than he thought initially:

And I am not quite sure why we are connecting the dots just now, but here we are: WCP is retained by a prominent Saudi to help with his 9/11 problem, as reported in April; in May, WCP hires a member of the 9/11 Commission.

Did Ms. Gorelick know about her new firm’s Saudi client? If she did know, did she get back with the Congressional Democrats who appointed her, and run this by them?

Or did she not know, in which case her confidence in her new partners, not to mention our credulity, may be a bit strained.

This is outrageous, and deserves more attention than it’s getting. Republicans won’t raise it, because it makes Bush look bad by playing up the Saudi connection. Democrats won’t raise it because Gorelick is a Democrat.

But that’s okay — we have an independent press so that this stuff will get attention even when it’s not a talking-point for either major party, right?

UPDATE: Reader Richard Riley emails:

Wait a minute. You properly chastise the press and others for chasing bogus “conflicts of interest” and, worse, “appearances” of conflicts of interest – in fact you wrote a good book about it. How is the Gorelick situation any different? Citing chapter and verse on partners technically being agents for all other partners in a partnership etc etc really won’t do the trick here. Obviously, Gorelick’s compensation at a big profitable place like Wilmer isn’t going to be noticeably affected one way or the other whether the firm does or doesn’t have the Prince as a client, so where’s the REAL conflict, not just the technical “conflict” (if it’s even that)? Fair’s fair.

Well, no. Actually, in the ethics book (now available in paperback! Cheap!) we argue that appearance ethics are proper for people in judicial-style roles, but shouldn’t be applied in political-style settings. So the question is, is the 9/11 inquiry commission essentially judicial (supposed to be independent, focused on facts, non-political) or is it political (involving accommodations between interest groups). It seems to me that it ought to be the former. Sounds like it’s shaping up to be the latter.

JOANNE JACOBS HAS THE LATEST on the crushing of dissent by Cal Poly’s racist administration.

Sounds like an election issue to me. And where’s the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division?

MORE TALK OF EXPLOITATION, but hypocritical as usual:

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) – Weapon sales by rich countries were responsible for the proliferation of wars, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. . . . Mahathir, a fierce critic of the U.S.-led war against Iraq, accused “high pressure arms salesmen” of forcing poor nations to buy weapons.

Well, gee, those guys must be good, because in the same story we learn:

Although no specific data was immediately available, Malaysia has boosted defense spending in recent years, allotting billions of dollars on new U.S. and Russian jet fighters, submarines and Polish tanks among others.

Last Tuesday Malaysia signed a $900 million deal to buy 18 Sukhoi Su-30MKs from Russia.

Those damned smooth-talking Russians, with their vodka and promises!

READER DYLAN MORRIS WRITES: “More about the RX8 please! Throw in a pic or two if you get a chance.”

Okay.

In general, my driving impressions match the ones from the test drive that I blogged earlier. Overall, the ambiance and feel is simultaneously that of a much more expensive car, and also evocative of the original, first-generation RX-7. I owned a 1980 model and loved it, though it had some rough edges.

This car doesn’t have the rough edges. It’s far more stable — especially on wet roads, of which we’ve had a lot around here lately — than the tailhappy first-generation RX-7. The response to the steering is very quick: think it, and it happens. I haven’t broken the tail loose much, partly because of that. (The other part is that I’m carefully observing the break-in period, and I’m noticeably out of practice driving a fast rear-drive car. I haven’t gone past about 7/10, though honestly on the twisty roads around here, much more than that would probably be suicidal because of the speed required versus the likelihood of finding something in the way). But the car corners like it’s on rails, and when you’re not pushing it you tend to wind up going a lot faster than you intended to because everything is so smooth, and so solid, that you don’t quite realize just how fast you’re actually going. The brakes are terrific.

Startup has the familiar burbling sound, but it dies out in a few seconds instead of a few minutes, which presumably indicates better fuel/air management. The engine note is very similar to my original RX. It’s an aircraft-like sound.

The six-speed shifter is very smooth, and very positive. When I test drove the Infiniti G35 coupe I found the shifting a bit iffy, and put it down to my being rusty at driving a stick shift sports car. Nope. It just has an iffy shift mechanism.

Everyone loves the interior, which a lot of people say has an Italian look. It’s very clean and un-gimmicky, but pleasing and functional. Controls are where they should be, and the car is largely free of annoying buttons and menus, as a sports car (or any car) should be. The back seat is surprisingly functional considering that the car is only a couple of inches longer than a Porsche Boxster. (The smaller size of the rotary engine makes that possible). The InstaDaughter likes it a lot, and there’s room for a full-sized adult, at least for about-town short trips. (I can actually fit there if the front seat is up a bit, but I wouldn’t want to stay there for very long. The InstaWife fits fine.)

The exterior turns heads everywhere I go. When the car is parked, it tends to draw a crowd, and when I drove it to the insurance office, the women there saw it through the window and ran outside to take a look. Kaus emailed me that he wasn’t crazy about the look of the car, but that seems to be a minority view. I even had one guy, driving a new 350Z that still had a temporary tag in the rear window, follow me into a parking lot to look at the car. He said he wished he’d bought one instead of the 350Z, which has got to worry a lot of folks at Nissan.

I’m very happy with the car. So far I only have one complaint: the oil dipstick is a bit inconvenient. You have to pop off a plastic engine cover, then reach down among some hoses to remove it. It’s no big deal, but given the need to check oil regularly on a rotary, it seems less well thought out than it might be. So far, though, I’ve used no measurable oil in over 500 miles. Gas mileage, on the other hand, has been so-so, but then it is a 250hp rotary, and I haven’t been driving for economy.

That’s pretty much it. Here’s a much more technical review, for those who are interested in apex-seal composition and the like.

BUSH ADMINISTRATION DIPLOMACY DISARMS A HOSTILE REGIME:

NEW YORK — The United Nations, under pressure from the Bush administration, has decided to move a stash of submachine guns out of the organization’s New York City headquarters.

The MP5s, made by Heckler and Koch of Germany, are to be moved to U.N. peacekeeping operations overseas, State Department sources said.

The United Nations purchased the restricted weapons for the personal protection of Secretary-General Kofi Annan in his travels around the New York metropolitan area.

The weapons often were visible in the support van of Mr. Annan’s motorcade as it moved throughout the city.

It was not clear why Mr. Annan’s bodyguards needed such weapons, said sources within the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service (DSS). . . .

Key factors were the U.N. security department’s lack of formal status as a law-enforcement agency and the risk of non-U.S. citizens gaining access to the weapons, State Department sources said.

You’re nobody if you don’t have submachinegun-wielding guards.

WHY BUSH SHOULD BE GRATEFUL TO ARNOLD: Schwarzenegger may or may not secure a California governorship for the Republicans, which would surely be welcome at the White House. But regardless, he’s done Bush a big favor just by entering the race.

With Arnold in it, the California election will suck up a huge share of media oxygen for the next couple of months. Together with the Kobe Bryant trial, it’s likely to keep the press largely in Sept. 10th mode for quite a while.

That’s a big deal for Bush because it will delay the “quagmire” talk — or at least keep it from crossing a critical threshold in terms of volume — well into the Fall. By then he’s likely to be able to present useful WMD evidence and/or signs of progress in Iraq, that’ll defuse the critics. (If anyone notices — this White House release doing both got precious little attention). But in essence, Arnold is bridging the too-early-for-clear-progress-but-not-too-early-for-concentrated-media-bitching period. By the time the dust has settled from that, Bush should be in a better position to engage the issue, as he’ll have to be by January anyway.

So that’s the good news for Bush: The media may be dumb and negative, but at least they’re easily distracted!

JEREMY LOTT HAS A NEW JOB. Wish him luck!