MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT on American campuses. It’s like the Second Coming of Joe McCarthy!

WHY DEMOCRATS are buying blogads. This gap won’t last.

JEFF JARVIS thinks we need a male anti-defamation league.

PHOTOGRAPHYBLOG has lots of stuff from the Photo Marketing Association. Loads of new cameras coming out.

JESSICA HARBOUR: “you know you are 21st-century white trash when you cross state lines with fireworks tucked into the trunk of your Volvo.”

PROGRESS IN THE WAR: Belmont Club observes:

That when dying and bleeding, beset by the flower of terrorism, with pistol to set against automatic rifle and grenade, the Iraqi police did not ask for help from 82nd Airborne. They asked for ammunition.

They won, too. Bill Quick has further comments.

SEAN HACKBARTH will be blogging the Wisconsin debate.

UPDATE: Here’s the result.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Kerry’s reference to the Vietnam War as “Nixon’s” gets fact-checked.

DANIEL DREZNER has an outsourcing update that’s worth reading.

JOE CONASON CONTAINS MULTITUDES: And Mickey Kaus is pointing it out.

JEFF JARVIS WRITES:

The reason Howard Dean (with Al Gore) lost is that they ran a negative campaign. But the problem wasn’t that they were negative about other candidates. It was that they were negative about America.

He’s got links and evidence. But I think that the real reason Gore lost in 2000 was incompetence, and I’ve got some pretty strong evidence, too:

A tale from Ned Ray McWherter’s 2000 experience, told to a reporter last week, will illustrate.

He had made a 10-day trip through the state, mostly in East Tennessee, as a Gore surrogate campaigner and returned, as instructed, to give a report to the campaign’s national headquarters in Nashville.

His travels, McWherter says, left him with a sense that things were going badly for Gore in his home state.

He had a plan, involving some personal campaigning by Gore, for turning things around.

“I sat there for about an hour in the headquarters, wanting to make a report to the people running the campaign. They sent somebody out and said they were busy.

“They put me off another hour or two and, well, my old butt got tired, and I got up and left. They were so busy they wouldn’t even talk to me and I was going to tell them they were about to get the hell beat out of them in East Tennessee,” he said.

“I left word with Johnny Hayes. He said he couldn’t get in to see them, either,” McWherter said. “They had other places to worry about, I guess.”

Ned Ray McWherter, a former Governor and State House Speaker, is probably the shrewdest politician Tennessee has ever produced. And he couldn’t even get a meeting?

If Gore had listened, he might have won Tennessee. If he’d won Tennessee, he’d have won the election, and Florida would be a footnote.

No wonder he’s so angry now. But really, I think, he’s angry at himself.

UPDATE: Elsewhere in the article quoted above, McWherter seems hot on a Kerry/Edwards ticket. But apparently the Kerry campaign isn’t so hot on Edwards:

Kerry is also said to be unconvinced that Edwards is experienced enough to step in as a wartime president should something happen to him. National security credentials are the most important assets that the Democratic presidential front-runner would use to choose a running mate, these aides said.

This is actually the most positive thing I’ve read about Kerry — since it’s an acknowledgement that we’re actually at war now, pace Al Gore — but it makes me wonder: What Democrat fills that bill?

What Kerry needs is to make a ballsy choice of someone with military experience, someone who may not be a traditional Democrat but who’s known as a fighter, who can appeal to swing voters, and who’ll give the Democrats instant credibility.

Note to Karl Rove: Make sure you’ve mended every single fence with John McCain. . . .

STATES, like the Federal government, generally have Freedom of Information Acts. State officials, however, aren’t very good about complying with the law sometimes:

After insisting that the volunteer give his name, Desjarlais used the Internet to identify the volunteer, find his cell phone number and call him after work hours.

In an interview after the audit, Desjarlais denied that he threatened or tried to intimidate the volunteer, who is a reporter with SNN-Channel 6 in Sarasota.

Desjarlais defended his actions, saying that the volunteer raised suspicion when he declined to explain who he was. Officials across the state had similar misgivings about volunteers who came into their offices.

They cited a number of arbitrary reasons for their suspicions, including the volunteers’ hair length, casual dress and, in one case, “the look in his eyes.”

Mary Kay Cariseo, executive director of the Florida Association of Counties, said people need to understand that making a public records request can be threatening to public officials.

“You’re not looking at e-mails to do something good,” she said. “You’re trying to find something. You’re trying to dig something up when we’re trying to be good public servants and run our governments.”

“Our governments.” That pretty much says it all, doesn’t it? (Via Fried Man).

FORCE-FEEDING at the Post?

Well, not just the Post.

ED CONE wonders where the Dean money went. Apparently, Joe Trippi doesn’t know.

INTERESTING SURVEY OF ANTI-AMERICANISM as a cultural force, in the Financial Times. The whole thing is a must-read, and indicates how little of the phenomenon is really policy-driven. Here’s a good excerpt:

Europe’s problem, as Bruckner sees it, is not that it has drifted too far to the left – for the left-right concept is one that he considers “totally discredited”. Nor is Europe’s problem simply anti-Americanism.

“Anti-Americanism can only be very ambivalent,” he says, “where American culture sets the tone. The French are voting for America – in the market place – all the time.” Rather, Bruckner says, “our great problem as Europeans is that we want to exit from history. Sometime after 1989, we developed the belief that barbarism could be refuted intellectually.” Here, he makes clear, he is speaking primarily of France and Germany, not the UK.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Some interesting further commentary here.

THE MUDVILLE GAZETTE military blog has a roundup of military bloggers’ reactions to the “Bush AWOL” story. Meanwhile reader Amy Denham notes that now that the initial case has collapsed with the appearance of records and eyewitnesses, “The argument is no longer ‘did he serve,’ but ‘how well did he serve?'” Since nothing short of seppuku would satisfy the critics, we know the answer to that one.

There’s a lot of goalpost-moving going on. Pejman Yousefzadeh has some comments on that.

And one of my colleagues who was a Marine in Vietnam (and who is quite unimpressed with Kerry) observed that he’s never before seen such open enthusiasm for military service among liberal academics of his generation. He thinks that they see support for Kerry, and slagging of Bush, on these issues as providing some sort of absolution for their own behavior in that era. I think that’s right.

UPDATE: Reader John Schedler emails: “Put my down as another Marine veteran of Vietnam (A 1/26) who agrees completely.”

I WISH THAT THIS were a bigger surprise:

Investigators have discovered that the nuclear weapons designs obtained by Libya through a Pakistani smuggling network originated in China, exposing yet another link in a chain of proliferation that stretched across the Middle East and Asia, according to government officials and arms experts.

The bomb designs and other papers turned over by Libya have yielded dramatic evidence of China’s long-suspected role in transferring nuclear know-how to Pakistan in the early 1980s, they said. The Chinese designs were later resold to Libya by a Pakistani-led trading network that is now the focus of an expanding international probe, added the officials and experts, who are based in the United States and Europe.

This also suggests that the Chinese are, well, dumb as rocks. Arming an unstable nation with whom one shares a border with nuclear weapons just seems awfully stupid to me. (See also Russia and Iran). I suspect that corruption played a role in that decision: probably Saudi money that bribed Chinese officials to give nuclear secrets to Pakistan that wound up in the hands of Libya. And where else?

The good news is that the end of Saddam’s reign seems to have destabilized a lot of these connections, and brought a lot of information out.

UPDATE: Jim Dunnigan has a lot more interesting background and commentary here.

READER ED CLARK complains that I’m running blogads for Democratic candidates. Well, I actually have a lot of Democratic readers, you know, and these guys obviously seem to think it’s worth it to reach them. (It certainly worked well for the Chandler campaign.) And I have nothing against Democrats per se, despite my unhappiness with the direction the Democratic Party is heading these days. But I’ll be more than happy to run ads for Republicans, whenever they’re ready to buy some. At the moment, the Democrats just seem to be ahead of the curve here. But I suspect that won’t last.

AL GORE SAYS TERRORISM ISN’T A THREAT: Jeff Jarvis says that Al Gore is revealing himself as unfit for politics and governance, yet again.

I was once pretty high on Gore — I worked in his 1988 campaign — but he’s been a complete disappointment. And now he’s not just a guy who lost an election. He’s a become a loser, and that transformation has been entirely his own work.

And those of us who were relieved on September 11 that Al Gore wasn’t the President are reminded, yet again, just why we were relieved. He’s too small a man for a job that big.

ADRIANA CRONIN OF SAMIZDATA stars in a charming Valentine to the blogosphere. The 21st Century needs more women like her: lovely, libertarian, and well-armed.

UPDATE: Reader Kerry DuPont emails: “Hmmmm, I guess that I should’ve posted that I got my husband a HK P7 for V-day. ‘Course he’s not as ‘pretty’ as Adriana….”

I should hope not. But he’s obviously a very lucky man.

THE NATION DOESN’T WANT RALPH NADER TO RUN. Nick Gillespie provides a translation.

The comment from Shannon Love is worth reading, too.

ROMANCE AND THE INTERNET: This is what it has come to.

THE CATO INSTITUTE is calling for an end to federal nanotechnology subsidies.

THE DELIGHTFUL MICHELE CATALANO is profiled at NormBlog.

ROGER SIMON has thoughts on Michael Moore’s labor relations philosophy, inspired by a not-very-flattering piece on Moore from The New Yorker.

SHELL OFFERS VALENTINE’S DAY ADVICE for both men and women.