JOHN PILGER, who as I noted below is rooting for the terrorists in Iraq (go here and scroll down to see what, exactly, he’s approving) is also a professor at Cornell:

The Rhodes Class of ’56 University Professorships, designed to enrich the undergraduate experience at the university, are awarded for a period of one to five years, and appointees are considered full members of the Cornell faculty. During each year of their appointment, Rhodes professors will visit the campus for a minimum of two weeks.

Cynthia McKinney is another holder of this formerly-prestigious appointment.

UPDATE: The selection process is under review, as well it should be. More here.

CONGRESSIONAL AIDE ARRESTED AS IRAQI SPY: The Smoking Gun has the indictment, and this summary:

A former Democratic congressional aide was arrested today on charges that she worked as an Iraqi spy. Susan Lindauer, 41, has been charged with conspiring to work with the Iraqi Intelligence Service and engaging in prohibited financial transactions with Saddam Hussein’s government, according to the below indictment unsealed today by federal prosecutors in New York. Lindauer, arrested this morning at her Maryland home, allegedly met with Iraqi agents during several visits to the country’s U.N. mission, where she “accepted various payments” in return “for services provided to the IIS in the course of her ongoing intelligence relationship with them.” Lindauer, who also allegedly traveled to Iraq in early-2002 to meet with IIS agents, has previously worked as a press spokesperson for several elected officials, including former Senator Carol Moseley-Braun and congressmen Ron Wyden and Peter DeFazio. (14 pages).

Many in the blogosphere have been speculating about Saddam making payoffs in the U.S., but this is the first case to materialize. It’s likely not the last.

More background and links here, where we also learn that she’s a former journalist, and that she signed this peace pledge. If I were a spy, I wouldn’t have done that.

UPDATE: More background here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: CNN says nothing about her backgound. [Okay, actually it’s an AP story on CNN.com. Still. . .]

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Charles Austin emails:

Maybe I’m just too attuned to it, but when I saw
the headline: Ex-Congressional Aide Charged With Spying

and read the first sentence:

A former journalist and congressional press secretary was arrested Thursday on charges she acted as an Iraqi spy before and after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, accepting $10,000 for her work, prosecutors said Thursday.

I thought immediately that it had to be a Democratic staffer. Otherwise, the word Republican would have been trumpeted loudly and I wouldn’t have had to wait until the fourth paragraph to find out the accused spy previously worked for Representative Wyden and Senator Mosley-Braun. By no means am I trying to imply that Representative Wyden or Senator Mosley-Braun knew or should have known anything about this, but just noting the Big Media dog that so often doesn’t bark at passing Democrats.

Indeed. See, if she had worked for a Republican who supported the war, it would be evidence of the hypocrisy of war supporters. But since she worked for Democrats, well, it’s just one of those crazy things that happen, of no particular significance in the greater scheme.

MORE: More on Lindauer and Libya, here, in a report that summarizes the indictment linked above.

STILL MORE: Reader David Hines emails:

Just saw the NBC evening news: Tom Brokaw not only skipped the substantial aspects of the indictment (her being paid ten grand *and* her willingness to perform aid and comfort when she believed she was aiding the “Iraqi resistance” with Libyan help), but he neglected to mention that she was a former journalist and former Democratic congressional aide.

He did take pains to report that she was a second cousin of White House staffer Andy Card.

I didn’t see it, but I can’t say I’m surprised to hear this.

MAJOR AUTOMOTIVE NEWS, from the new Consumer Reports car issue:

Our latest survey of subscribers’ experiences with their cars shows that vehicles from Detroit’s Big Three automakers are now slightly more reliable, on average, than those from European makers. They also tend to hold up better than the European makes as time passes. It’s the first time in decades that U.S. cars have done so well.

This seems like quite a big deal to me, and not just for the automotive industry. And judging from the chart it reflects improvements in American vehicles rather than a quality decline among European cars. There’s even a modest closing of the gap between American and Japanese cars, though the Japanese remain well ahead.

STILL MORE ON THE UNITED NATIONS AND SADDAM’S OIL MONEY, from the Wall Street Journal.

BOMBINGS IN MADRID: 131 killed. Basque “separatists” — the usual suspects — say it wasn’t them, but the “Arab resistance.” Should we believe them? Beats me. If it is Arabs — and that’s probably the way to bet — this is likely the harbinger of more attacks in Europe.

There’s much more over at Iberian Notes and Backseat Drivers.

UPDATE: Jan Haugland has more, and notes:

Batasuna leader Arnaldo Otegi has stated on Basque radio that he does not believe ETA is responsible. Interestingly, Batasuna officially denies being the political front of ETA, but now they are forced to be its public front in denying ETA responsibility. So is there any credibility to the claim? What is the point of terrorism if you don’t take responsibility? There has been speculations that the attack was far more successful than planned, or that the ETA had intended to issue a warning but somehow failed to do it. Alternatively, that ETA has been radicalised by a new leadership. The fact that Spanish police has foiled semilar plots by the ETA in the near past counts against this denial.

Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Josh Chafetz observes:

Some are skeptical that this was the work of the ETA. That’s ultimately for the police and intelligence services to figure out, but I’m skeptical of the skeptics. ETA hasn’t always announced its attacks ahead of time, and Spanish authorities had been worried about an ETA attack ahead of this weekend’s elections. Given ETA’s history, it seems to me that the default assumption should be that it was them.

I think that’s probably right, though I claim no special expertise. I also think that it’s entirely plausible to imagine cooperation between the ETA and Al Qaeda groups, something we were hearing about as long ago as 1996 (scroll down past the story where President Clinton talks about Iraq as a sponsor of terorrism, to the one about Islamic terror in France). Thanks to reader Sarah Gossett for the link.

The Spanish government seems convinced that this is an ETA attack. John at Iberian Notes says it fits the ETA’s pattern.

Gerard Van der Leun has some thoughts that are worth reading.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Phil Carter has many useful observations, and this important conclusion:

Finally, let us consider that the “war on terrorism” is really much larger than what even American thinks of it. Liberal society, broadly defined, is at war with the forces of terror which seek to undermine the global civil society that prizes such things as liberty, equality, interdependence, free trade, self-determination, human rights, education, and science. (This is essentially Paul Berman’s thesis from his brilliant book Terror and Liberalism) At times, the values of liberal society clash with each other, such as the clash between free trade and human rights. But ultimately, I believe this society to be far better than the alternative, and to be the ideal that we all must strive for. Terrorism seeks to undermine this global order through fear and violence; it seeks to destroy liberal society in order to replace it with a far different vision of the world.

Whether you are Spanish, Turkish, Indonesian, French or American, you are a target. We have all been victims of this terrorism in the last decade; we will continue to be targeted in the next. Our challenge is to face such attacks as this and to confront them with the appropriate tools of law, statecraft and war. But we must do more. We must also beat the terrorist enemy with our ideas. It is not capitalism of democracy per se that terrorism seeks to destroy — it is global civil society itself. To prevent that, we must make global civil society as strong and resolute an institution as possible, and to make it good enough that it will ultimately prove the fallacy of the terrorist ideology. That is the challenge.

Read the whole thing.

MORE: A possible Arab link? Hard to say. Early reports are usually wrong. All we really have to know is that this sucks, and that either Al Qaeda or ETA or a host of other groups would have done it if they could have. So there’s no reason to be overly-discriminating in our response. As Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Polly noted, it won’t be a lick amiss, regardless.

Meanwhile Politica Obscura wonders how long it will be until someone blames Bush. It’s probably already happened.

STILL MORE: Is this claim of Al Qaeda involvement credible? Beats me. Plausible, certainly. Meanwhile BoiFromTroy observes that if Al Qaeda is behind these attacks, it just underscores that “the only people in the world who believe that the liberation of Iraq was George Bush’s unilateral action are the people who seek to replace him in the Oval Office.”

And read Roger Simon’s thoughts on what this is likely to mean in terms of European responses to terror.

MORE STILL: They’re already blaming Bush at Democratic Underground. No surprise there. A lot of the folks at Daily Kos seem to think the same thing.

STILL MORE: Donald Sensing has more, and some TV screenshots.

YET MORE STILL: Mark Steyn:

As Hussein Massawi, former leader of Hezbollah, neatly put it, “We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.” . . .

And now Spaniards. “We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.” And by “you”, they mean not just arrogant Texan cowboys, but any pluralist society – whether a relaxed tourist resort like Bali or a modern Muslim nation like Turkey or – come to that, one day down the road – a cynical swamp of appeasement like France.

Which adds meaning to this passage from an LGF comment thread (I couldn’t find it among the myriads there, but the poster, Ernest Gudath, emailed it to me):

I am an American. A Californian to be exact. From nowhere special. I have never been to Spain. I may never go to Spain. I don’t even speak Spanish. But today, today I am a Spaniard. We are all Spaniards. Your country has suffered a disaster that I can not now, nor will likely ever, fully comprehend. Men of evil did this. Yes, I say evil, for there is no other word to describe the hatred, the callous disregard for human life and God granted dignity of men, of those who would commit such an act. I wish to express my greatest sympathy to the people of Spain, who suffer now because of the scourge of terrorism. This suffering shall not just die away. It shall linger, linger on in the hearts of those who must bury their dead, who must visit the graves of them each year on this day, those who must explain to their children why Mother, or Father, or Brother, or Sister will not be coming home again. To those who will mourn the passing of loved ones their whole lives, this day shall never end. My prayers are with you all. This is a wound that shall never fully heal, and that is the greatest sorrow of all. Buildings and trains may be rebuilt, but lives can not. Spain stood by America in its darkest time in recent years, something that I, or any American, shall never forget. You stood by us in our hour of darkness, now let us return that favor. Whatever it is that you need now of us, just ask. We shall be there for you. My prayers are with the people of Spain. May God bless you, and all the people of Spain, and may His justice be swift, and sure.

Well said. And if you’re reading this as an individual post, go here for something you can do.

EURSOC has more observations. And so does Bjorn Staerk: ” We can at least hope that warnings against terrorism will now be taken more seriously, and clever justifications of it less.”

FINAL UPDATE: Look to later posts for more on this. But reader Ernest Gudath sends the link to the item posted above and notes that — contrary to the impression I had gotten from his email — he’s not the author.

OIL-FOR-FOOD UPDATE:

In the growing scandal over the United Nations Oil-for-Food program, which from 1996-2003 supervised relief to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and his staff have excused themselves from any responsibility for the massive corruption involving billions in bribes and kickbacks that went on via more than $100 billion in U.N.-approved contracts for Saddam to sell oil and buy humanitarian supplies. U.N. officials have denied that this tidal wave of graft in any way seeped into their own shop, or that they even had time to notice it was out there. They were too busy making the world a better place.

That’s fascinating, not least given the ties of Annan’s own son, Kojo Annan, to the Switzerland-based firm, Cotecna, which from 1999 onward worked on contract for the U.N. monitoring the shipments of Oil-for-food supplies into Iraq. These were the same supplies sent in under terms of those tens of billions of dollars worth of U.N.-approved contracts in which the U.N. says it failed to notice Saddam Hussein’s widespread arrangements to overpay contractors who then shipped overpriced goods to the impoverished people of Iraq and kicked back part of their profits to Saddam’s regime. . . .

But what has to be clear by now is that the U.N. itself was either corrupt, or so stunningly incompetent as to require total overhaul. There are by now enough questions, there has been enough secrecy, stonewalling, and rising evidence of graft all around the U.N. program in Iraq, so that it is surely worth an independent investigation into the U.N. itself — and Annan’s role in supervising this program. If Kofi Annan will not exercise his authority to set a truly independent inquiry in motion, it is way past time for the U.S., whose taxpayers supply about a quarter of the U.N. budget, to call the U.N. itself to account for Oil-for-Food — in dollar terms the biggest relief operation it has ever run, and by many signs, one of the dirtiest.

Keep digging.

UPDATE: Roger Simon observes:

I recommended in a previous post that United States demand that henceforth all the United Nations books be open, before we continue our massive donation to that organization. I wonder where Senator Kerry would stand on that?

Somebody should ask him.

MILITARY DEATHS IN IRAQ are down significantly. Funny that it’s not getting a lot of news attention. As I’ve said elsewhere, things are going better in Iraq, and the real proof of that “is that neither John Kerry nor Katie Couric want to talk much about events there, or about the new Iraqi constitution and what it means.”

UPDATE: There’s good economic news from Iraq, too.

ANN ALTHOUSE WONDERS if it’s time for a Prufrock revival. No, it isn’t. But she’s spotted something interesting.

JAY MANIFOLD notes that major asteroid impacts may be more common than previously thought. Ouch.

SOME INTERESTING POSTS on employment and outsourcing, from Daniel Drezner and Virginia Postrel.

REID STOTT ON HOWARD STERN:

But if you want the short tame proof this is nothing new, consider this quote: “Howard Stern is Dead Man Talking. Remember where you heard it first.” And where and when did we hear it first? From Michael Harris, in Ottawa, Tuesday, November 18, 1997.

Seven years ago.

Read the whole thing.

THE WHOMPING WILLOW is a pretty cool blog name — and I imagine that she can deliver a fearsome whomping if provoked.

VIRGINIA POSTREL NOTES more problems with the Kass council (“Get ready to hear about how authentic human beings don’t take Prozac”) and James Hughes writes that George W. Bush is being brain-jacked.

Meanwhile Ron Bailey notes that public attitudes have shifted in favor of new reproductive and life-extending technologies over time, as people come to understand them better:

After all, in 1969, a Harris poll found that a majority of Americans believed that producing test-tube babies was “against God’s will.” Christiaan Barnard was condemned by many as a “butcher” when he transplanted the first heart into the chest of 55-year-old Louis Washkansky on December 3, 1967. The contraceptive pill introduced in 1960 was outlawed by many states until near the end of that decade. And much further back, Edward Jenner’s 1796 discovery that inoculation with cowpox scabs would prevent people from getting smallpox was mocked by newspaper editorials and cartoons depicting men with cow’s heads.

As history amply demonstrates, the public’s immediate “yuck” reaction to new technologies is a very fallible and highly changeable guide to moral choices or biomedical policy. For example, by 1978, more than half of Americans said that they would use in vitro fertilization (IVF) if they were married and couldn’t have babies any other way. More than 200,000 test-tube babies later, the majority of Americans now heartily approve of IVF. Globally nearly 50,000 heart transplants have been performed, and 83 percent of Americans favor organ donation. The contraceptive pill is legal in all states and millions of American families have used them to control their reproductive lives. And smallpox is the first human disease ever eradicated.

What the polling data and history clearly show is that as people’s understanding of new technologies increases, most of them overcome their initial fears and end up welcoming new technological advances rather than rejecting them.

Yes. Which is why opponents are so anxious to stop research early.

NOT ANTI-WAR, JUST ON THE OTHER SIDE:

TONY JONES: John Pilger, do you still maintain that the world depends on what you call “the Iraqi resistance” to inflict a military defeat on the coalition forces?

JOHN PILGER: Well, certainly, historically, we’ve always depended on resistances to get rid of occupiers, to get rid of invaders. And what we have in Iraq now is I suppose the equivalent of a kind of Vichy Government being set up. And a resistance is always atrocious, it’s always bloody. It always involves terrorism. . . . Now, I think the situation in Iraq is so dire that unless the United States is defeated there that we’re likely to see an attack on Iran, we’re likely to see an attack on North Korea and all the way down the road it could be even an attack on China within a decade, so I think what happens in Iraq now is incredibly important.

TONY JONES: Can you approve in that context the killing of American, British or Australian troops who are in the occupying forces?

JOHN PILGER: Well yes, they’re legitimate targets. They’re illegally occupying a country. And I would have thought from an Iraqi’s point of view they are legitimate targets, they’d have to be, sure.

TONY JONES: So Australian troops you would regard in Iraq as legitimate targets?

JOHN PILGER: Excuse me but, really, that’s an unbecoming question.

With some revealing answers.

UPDATE: Lovely observation:

Perhaps the most telling comment from Pilger was that the only countries he feared the US might go after were all fascist dictatorships.

That’s today’s Left. Go figure.

JOHN MCCAIN ON A KERRY-MCCAIN TICKET: “Obviously I would entertain it.” Just remember, you heard it here first.

UPDATE: Here’s more on McCain as Veep from the Arizona Republic, here and here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Bradley Pratt emails:

I’d vote for a Kerry/McCain ticket in an INSTANT. Otherwise, probably Bush.

Out-of-control spending, rising deficits, amending the constitution (!!!)… these are all troubling. But nothing is so important to me as our security, and a belief that our leaders are at least trying to do the best job possible in Iraq. Suddenly, with Kerry/McCain, I’m feeling pretty good about all of these things.

Er, well, it’s not all that likely to happen, you know. . . .

UPDATE: You know, I think this is actually a brilliant Republican stroke. Floating these rumors implicitly sets a high standard for Kerry — whoever he picks will now be compared to McCain, and fall short. And if McCain winds up Bush’s VP, well. . .

THE NEW YORK TIMES is threatening a blogger for putting up this parody NYT corrections page. A Times lawyer writes The National Debate:

Your actions are deliberately designed to confuse people and are clearly illegal.

Both statements seem false to me. It’s pretty obviously a parody: note the February 30 date — er, and the URL clearly visible at the top. And the Site Meter counter! (Er, and to be painfully obvious, the disclaimer at the bottom. . . ) Sure, some people might be dumb enough to be fooled anyway, but that’s true with any parody. Thus, I’d say that “clearly illegal” is, well, false. “Arguably not a protected parody” would be more honest, though in my opinion still wrong, except to the extent that anything is arguable if you pay enough lawyers to argue it.

Of course, the biggest giveaway that this is a parody site is that it’s a page featuring corrections of major factual errors in New York Times oped columns. No one familiar with the Times would think that was genuine. . . . And that very fact may be what stung the Times into sending this threat, though more likely it’s just the product of humorless IP lawyers with nothing better to do. (Can a “humorless” lawyer even express a valid professional opinion on whether something is a parody? Sounds like a good topic for a law review article!)

To me this looks as dumb and self-defeating as Fox News’s suit against Al Franken.

And my advice to the New York Times is: strengthen your “likelihood of confusion” case by actually publishing a page like this yourselves. It’s past time.

UPDATE: Hmm. It seems that the Times took a rather negative view of the Franken suit.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader who says he’s a copyright lawyer thinks I overstate the strength of the parody defense, and put too much emphasis on the likelihood of confusion point. Could be — this isn’t my area of expertise. But it’s the Times lawyer’s letter that stresses likelihood of confusion, which seems silly to me. I certainly wasn’t confused by the page for a second, and I think that characterizing it as a deliberate effort to confuse people is absurd.

And regardless of the legalities here, the Times is being a bully. If, say, Rush Limbaugh were doing this to a critic under the same kind of circumstances, I suspect the Times would be all over him for it.

JOHN KERRY, KILLER!

Though he always has opposed the death penalty, Sen. John Kerry said Tuesday that the Sept. 11 attacks made him realize that he would want to “blow Osama bin Laden’s brains out.”

I approve of the sentiment, but it kind of reminds me of the pistol-packing Geraldo’s promise to “take Osama down” if he encountered him in Afghanistan.

I’M HERE WORKING on the law review article I mentioned, even though it’s a beautiful day. I’d rather be off in the mountains taking pictures again, but since I can’t get away I’ll post this picture from Sunday.

It’s a Smoky Mountain photographer-cliche — lichen on wet rock — but it’s still kind of nice. I have to say that I’m pleasantly impressed at how well the Toshiba, which is very much a consumer-grade digital camera, does at relatively challenging stuff. This was taken at pretty close range and its macro setting does well, as you can see: Not as well as a medium-format film camera, but probably as well as a handheld 35mm SLR, allowing for the inevitable slight blur caused by camera movement and shallow depth-of-field in this kind of setting.

Somebody emailed a while back that the real news wasn’t how good the top-end digital camera equipment is, but rather how good the low-end stuff is getting. I think that may be true.

This soon to appear Olympus looks pretty good. It’s not out yet (Amazon says it’s shipping, but I think that’s wrong). I think, though, that all the 8MP cameras are using the same Sony CCD right now. I wonder if that means that this camera will have the purple-fringe issues that the Sony DSC-F828 seems to have. (Though note the mixed reports from actual users.) I’m still leaning toward a digital SLR to replace my vintage 35mm SLRs, but I do sort of wonder how much difference the increased quality will make given how happy I am with the images from the Toshiba.

Back to work. If you want more pictures, visit SmokyBlog, because I won’t be taking them today. Sigh.

MORE ON SPACE: My TechCentralStation column is up.

I’m also spending my spring break writing an article on the Bush Administration’s space policy and its implications for international and domestic space law, for the Journal of Air Law and Commerce. I may try to distill a bit of that into either another column or a blog post. After it’s written!

COLLIN MAY notes that European governments are shifting rightward, and has some thoughts on what it means.

THE FRENCH are waffling about the desirability of a Kerry presidency.

VARIOUS PEOPLE seem to be portraying controls on broadcast indecency as some sort of Republican plot. This story would seem to offer a corrective:

Senate Panel Votes to Raise Indecency Fine, Put Limits on Violence: The Senate Commerce Committee voted 23-0 today to approve legislation that would raise fines for indecent broadcasts to as much as $500,000 and for the first time in history could subject violent TV programming whether originating on broadcast, basic cable or satellite TV channels to the same punishment.

Sounds pretty bipartisan to me — unanimous. (Then, of course, there’s Kerry’s support for the dropping of Howard Stern’s show.) But here’s the really interesting bit:

At today’s vote, Sen. Hollings also introduced an amendment that would have required cable operators to offer their programming a la carte, allowing consumers to buy and pay for only the programming they want. But he withdrew the measure after it became clear that he didn’t have the votes to support it.

It seems to me that this proposal would answer any complaints (except with regard to labelling, I guess) that any parent could have about indecent programming on cable — you don’t want the channel, don’t buy it. The cable industry naturally opposes this — bundling the Celebrity Underwater Kite-Flying Channel with HBO is how they fleece consumers make a lot of their money — but I hope that it’s an idea that will come back. (And I can only attribute Hollings’ failure to get enough votes to undue influence on the part of the cable industry, as I can’t imagine any Senator’s constituents opposing this idea.)

Yes, it’s rare for me to praise Fritz, but this looks like a good idea to me. On the indecency ban, well, I think that the unanimous passage indicates that there are a lot of people out there who want this. You may think that’s a bad idea (in fact, I do) but it’s not a sinister plot by a theocratic Republican minority. And, in fact, I think that opponents of the indecency ban have hurt their cause by engaging in Bush-bashing instead of addressing genuine popular sentiment head-on.

UPDATE: Reader Frank Vance emails:

I have been advocating forced unbundling of the channels on cable and satellite for several years, ever since I took a serious look at my 100 channel (now 120 channel!) package and determined I have only watched maybe 20 of these channels in all the time I have had the service. And maybe 10 of the remainder I have actually locked to prevent my children or their friends from viewing.

Of course, if I downgraded service to the 50/60 channel level, I lose maybe half of the channels I actually watch.

Senator Hollings is correct, this would fix the problem. We need to make this a meme based on “Consumer Choice”, and get it in front of the FCC, the House, and the Senate.

(Keep in mind a big part of the problem is that much of the bundling is forced upon the cable/satellite services by the media giants [Viacom, ABC/Disney, et al.] who use their control of local affiliates to dictate the package placement of their “cable” channels. Dish Network [Echostar] and Viacom are currently involved in a dispute over the pricing of the Viacom channel “bundles”.)

Back in the days when ‘dishes’ were large (C band), most of the pricing was a la carte. Of course, you could get bundles for related channels from the same vendor (like all the HBO channels from Time Warner) if you were so inclined. In fact, this is the European (but not British) satellite model. SES Astra (and one or two competitors) provides the satellite, but customers subscribe to the programming (or bundled services) they want directly. The programming providers then pay the satellite company for transponder space on the satellites.

I think part of MTV’s problem is they look at number of “subscribers”, believe that reflects the number of “viewers”, and think they are driving mainstream thought. That’s why the backlash over the SuperBowl halftime show surprised them so. They honestly believe people actually watch their channels….

Kind of like op-ed columnists who believe that their readership matches the newspaper’s circulation numbers, I guess. . . .

I don’t know a lot about cable TV regulation, but I can’t imagine a legitimate objection to unbundling here. Why should people be forced to buy things they don’t want?

Meanwhile, Ed Cone notes that FCC Commissioner Michael Copps (a Democrat appointed by Bush — can’t get more bipartisan than that!) suggested in an interview in 2002 that the FCC was looking for an egregious case that it could use to reestablish decency regulation. MTV, and Stern, gave it to them.

UPDATE: Steve Postrel emails to defend cable-bundling:

Some of the econo-bloggers may get to this, but there is nothing particularly nefarious about bundling–it’s an alternative to other forms of price discrimination. The idea is that if customers’ willingness to pay for different products isn’t positively correlated (i.e. people who like the Fishing Channel are no more likely to also like the Crocheting Channel) then charging an average price for the bundle means that the firm doesn’t have to figure out which buyers love fishing and which love crocheting. Instead of charging high Fishing prices and low Crocheting to one group and low Fishing and high Crocheting to another group, you charge the same bundled price to everybody. Like price discrimination, in many circumstances this practice improves economic welfare (i.e. more mutually beneficial transactions are possible compared to a world where bundling is illegal).

Moreover, with information goods, where the incremental cost of serving another customer is near zero and where the population’s tastes are very diverse, it makes extra sense to bundle. Yannis Bakos and Eric Brynojolfsson have a Management Science article in Dec. 1999 that makes this point very convincingly and even shows why you’d expect to end up with various alternative bundles being offered, as in cable TV with its various tiers and packages.

Hmm. Well, if you put the indecency bit aside this may make sense — but when people have channels whose content they object to bundled with channels they want, it seems to me that unbundling is better than government regulation. And I’d rather choose a la carte anyway — as, I suspect, would most cable customers.

MORE: Barbara Skolaut would! She emails:

I’d get behind cable un-bundling in a heartbeat! I have no interest in most of my cable channels, but have to take them to get the ones I want (HGTV, Food Network, Discovery, etc.).

My cable company (Comcast) used to call me periodically trying to get me to “upgrade” (pay them more money) to HBO, etc. I alway refused. One day I got irked and told them I was never taking any of the “premium” channels and I wished they’d quit calling me unless they could offer me something I really wanted – such as NO sports channels and a lower monthly cost. Haven’t heard from them since (nor do I expect to).

Don’t hold your breath.

BTW, THE SPIRIT OF AMERICA ad to the left is a freebie. I donated money to them a while back, so now I’m donating an ad.

OUT KIND OF LATE TONIGHT, for me anyway. My wife’s documentary, Six, showed to a capacity crowd of mostly psychologists and social workers. (You can see an online trailer here.)

Interesting post-film discussion, underscoring one of my wife’s points: that dealing with violent, usually mentally ill, teenagers is as much a management problem as a psychology problem. Schools, etc., tend to ignore them, mental health professionals often throw psychotropic drugs at them without sufficient followup, and law enforcement generally doesn’t want to get involved in cases where mental illness is an issue. Lots of psychologists had stories along these lines. Once somebody gets killed, people pay attention (usually). But it’s damned hard to get them to do so beforehand.

ROGER SIMON:

I interrupt this post for a prediction… When the Iranian mullahcracy is finally brought down (let’s hope soon), its monetary relations will be revealed to be at least as corrupt as the Iraqi/Un Oil-For-Food Program.

It seems likely.

UPDATE: Just added the picture to the right, from the French Embassy protests in Washington about a year ago. It just seemed, well, generally appropriate.

I should also note that I prefer the term “mullarchy” for the Iranian political scene, since it’s shorter, and has the advantage of rhyming, more or less, with “malarkey.” It seems to be catching on.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Stephen Bainbridge has some France-related thoughts.