ME, TOO. Dave Winer writes:

I would love to see [the] candidates make an impassioned plea to keep the Internet free of interference from the entertainment industry.

Will it happen?

IF YOU’RE A UNIX PROGRAMMER — which I’m not — you may be interested in Eric S. Raymond’s new book on Unix programming. If you’re a blogger — which I am — you may be interested to know that he’s blogging again.

INTERESTED IN ECONOMICS OR BUSINESS? Check out this week’s Carnival of the Capitalists, a collection of interesting blog posts on these topics.

THOUSANDS TURNED OUT AT A SUPPORT THE TROOPS RALLY NEAR SEATTLE, which was organized in response to plans by antiwar types to protest the deployment. There are lots of pictures at the blog post linked above. Here’s a news story about the rally.

CHRIS GEIDNER POSTS A DEFENSE OF STUDENT-EDITED LAW REVIEWS, and has links to quite a few other people’s thoughts on the subject.

Now is the wrong time to ask me what I think, as I’m bleary-eyed from adding footnotes and making changes in response to editorial suggestions from the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, to whom I’m supposed to return my edited piece shortly. (The worst thing about their suggestions by far is that they’re mostly good ones, meaning that I have to follow them. D’oh!) In general, I’m a fan of student-edited law reviews. They have their virtues and their vices, but I think that, overall, they help to keep legal scholarship from becoming as inbred as scholarship in some other disciplines becomes. I also find their close attention to footnoting tiresome and tedious when it’s applied to my pieces, but highly useful when it’s applied to other people’s. . . .

AIN’T IT THE TRUTH:

Today, Anti-Americanism is the closest we come to a common ideology in Europe.

Read the whole thing.

HERE’S A LINK TO THE DEMAND LETTER received by blogger Justene Adamec with regard to Infotel, posted by her co-blogger.

I think that this story deserves a lot more attention. And while I’m no expert at all on California law (perhaps Eugene Volokh will weigh in here), the claim that the right of privacy in the California Constitution somehow yields an obligation on the part of a blogger to remove posts (or comments to posts) that merely threaten to reveal private data seems to me to be rather a stretch. Yet that seems to be the claim. There’s certainly no case law authority cited in support of that proposition, as one might expect if there were any substance to it. I’ve been thinking for a while of writing an article on lawyers’ ethical duties in writing demand letters; this, while not an especially egregious example, suggests to me that I should move that topic higher on my agenda. Meanwhile this post on libel by Yale Law Prof. Jack Balkin, though directed at a different incident, provides some useful information, as does this one.

Meanwhile, there’s blowback. I had never heard of Infotel before. Now — more because of the actions of their attorneys than because of anything that appeared on Justene Adamec’s weblog — I have a very low opinion of them.

ANDREW SULLIVAN WONDERS WHY Stephen F. Hayes’ story in the Weekly Standard about the Saddam / Al Qaeda connection isn’t getting more attention. I strongly suspect that a story of similar provenance that reflected badly on the Administration would be getting a lot more play.

In addition, a commenter over at Roger Simon’s points out this from Janet Reno’s Justice Department:

According to the indictment, bin Laden and al Qaeda forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in Sudan and with representatives of the Government of Iran and its associated terrorist group Hezballah with the goal of working together against their common enemies in the West, particularly the United States.

“In addition, al Qaeda reached an understanding with the Government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq,” the indictment said.

Interesting. Funny that everyone seems to be forgetting this stuff, now.

In case you missed it, here’s my earlier post on this topic, with various interesting links. And don’t miss this on Saddam, uranium, and Africa — with more links from the Clinton Administration.

UPDATE: Reader Steve Biddle emails:

Re Stephen Hayes’ Weekly Standard piece on the ties between Saddam and al Qaeda, I too have wondered why there wasn’t more media attention paid to what I considered quite a blockbuster. Of course, it’s true that it doesn’t reflect at all badly on the Bush administration, so that’s one reason. But there’s another. Remember a few weeks ago a “study” was released purporting to prove that those poor benighted individuals who watched Fox News “misunderstood” some things that NPR listeners and PBS watchers understood perfectly? One of those things was that we who watched Fox seemed to believe that there was some sort of connection between Saddam and UBL… while the enlightened knew perfectly well that there was no evidence of that.

He sends the link to that story, which describes the belief that Saddam and Al Qaeda worked together as a “misperception.” Hey, maybe the Fox viewers are paying attention to Janet Reno!

MICKEY KAUS wants to apply “modern speed-dating technology” to the Democratic candidate debates. It couldn’t hurt!

MICHAEL MOYNIHAN’S back at The Politburo. Check it out.