MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT, this time via a National Nanotechnology Initiative official regarding a conference at the University of South Carolina. Here’s what nanotechnology expert Eric Drexler was trying to say:

Molecular manufacturing will bring a revolution in military affairs greater than the transition from hand-made spears to mass-produced guns. It is unwise to be on the wrong side of such a technology gap. NNI policy today opposes not only research on molecular manufacturing, but open dialog on its scientific basis and potential consequences. Given its current military superiority, terrorists cannot disarm, conquer, or destroy the United States. However, in a competitive world, the denialist policies of the NNI place us on a path to unilateral disarmament. Continuation of those policies thus poses a grave threat.

Seems like a curious mistake for the national-security conscious Bush Administration. Fortunately, the dissent-crushing efforts were unsuccessful, and Drexler did speak.

FISK FISKS FISK: Heh.

SOME THOUGHTS ON IRAQ, over at GlennReynolds.com.

THE BLOGOSPHERE KNEW THIS, but it’s nice to see the mainstream press noting that the “furor” over Bush’s 9/11 ads was entirely manufactured:

We have no doubt that the use of the images is appropriate – given that the president’s leadership in the wake of 9/11, and his conduct of the War on Terror, are under drumbeat assault by John Kerry and the Democrats.

But now it turns out that this whole furor is driven by a tiny group that’s motivated by a far-left agenda and a festering hatred of the president – and has some quite dubious financial ties.

Leading the rhetorical charge has been an outfit called September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows – which, the group admits, has only a few dozen members and represents relatives of no more than 1 percent of the 9/11 victims.

More to the point, the group was formed specifically to oppose the entire War on Terror: Not just the campaign against Saddam Hussein, but also the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Indeed, the group’s leaders traveled to Afghanistan, drawing a detestable moral equivalence between the 9/11 attacks and U.S. bombing of the Taliban and opposing “violent responses to terrorism.” . . .

And back in January 2003, the group said had it had gotten a “verbal commitment” to the fund proposal from the junior senator from Massachusetts – John F. Kerry.

Little surprise there – because Peaceful Tomorrows’ parent group, the San Francisco-based Tides Foundation, has received millions from foundations controlled by Kerry’s heiress wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry.

Tides gets much of its funds from philanthropists like Mrs. Kerry and billionaire George Soros – who has made defeating President Bush his top personal priority.

As Richard Berman, director of the Center for Consumer Freedom, told Congress in 2002: “The Tides Foundation distributes other foundations’ money, while shielding the identity of the actual donors.”

Call it charitable money-laundering.

Could this be a campaign-finance law violation? I don’t know enough to tell, but it’s certainly an end-run, legal or otherwise. But it’s yet another reason to wonder why the finances of nonprofits don’t get more scrutiny — and why the press is so ready to take these sorts of groups at face value, instead of looking into where their money comes from.

And, once again, it looks as if another “peace” group isn’t really for peace, but simply on the other side. And, apparently, on Kerry’s side as well.

That should bother him, and at least some of his supporters. Shouldn’t it?

UPDATE: Well, here’s someone who’s looking into the question of whether Theresa Heinz is covertly aiding the Kerry campaign.

Meanwhile a pseudonymous reader says that the Tides accusations are bunk:

To summarize–The Heinz Endowments, of which Teresa is chair (there’s also a board that approves grants), gives money for local, mostly small-bore initiatives
here in SWPA, sometimes through the Tides Center (PA).

What Tides does is process Form 990, handle HR payroll and benefits, and provide a vehicle for grant applications and monies. It’s simply a way for the
local foundation community to avoid setting up new 501(c)(3)’s merely for ad hoc projects, that they will then feel obligated to support.

That’s not what the article quoted above says, but OK. (And here’s a link to a generally favorable article by Dennis Roddy on the Tides Foundation and Teresa Heinz.)

Whether or not there’s financial chicanery, however, doesn’t account for the many other anti-Bush connections of the “spokespeople” criticizing the ads, which were ignored in mainstream press reports, but noticed by bloggers with Google. (More of that here, here, and here.)

Don’t journalists, like, find out stuff about people for a living? Or have they outsourced that to the blogosphere?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jay Rosen writes that the “find out stuff” job description is woefully out of date.

More here.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Still more on the press’s abject failure on this subject.

MORE: Hmm. It does sound suspicious when you put it this way:

It also turns out that those anti-Bush “9/11 families” number only about 120 out of 3,000 victim families–and that they’re all part of an organized anti-Bush, anti-war organization, “September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.” And it further turns out that this group, just coincidentally, also happens to be a project of an organization that gets major funding from the Heinz foundations.

Hmm. Call me crazy, but if these were Scaife-funded folks denouncing Kerry I think the media would note the connection. And Jay Caruso emails: “There’s no way these reporters didn’t know who these people were. Yet they deliberately left out this information, knowing it would cause controversy.”

STILL MORE: Reader Erik Fortune emails:

Notice the last line of the Associated Press article about the retired
national guardsman who reported seeing President Bush on base in Alabama
(Link):

“Calhoun has not made any donations to Bush this election season or during the 2000 season, according to campaign finance records.”

See? The (associated) press _does_ go look for conflicts of interest … when the person in question supports Bush.

I’ll give them credit for reporting that they didn’t find anything in this case, but the fact that they looked is telling. If the press were half as, um, diligent wrt the 9-11 families, the whole incident would have had a hugely different spin.

Yes, it would have.

MORE: Still more on this subject here, from the Arizona Republic website. And Tom Perry has a long and link-filled post on the subject.

THE SEASON OF “CONFUSION.” Yes. Sunday it was beautiful, until it turned cold and nasty. Yesterday it was sunny, but got colder. Tonight they’re talking snow.

JAMES LILEKS reviews the Kerry campaign blog.

HALLEY SUITT thinks blog posts should be short and sweet.

I think it depends. Blogs are good at serving up short pointers and nuggets of insight. But I don’t mind a longer post when people have something more substantial to say.

JOHN KERRY IS NOT BLACK, and black people have noticed:

WASHINGTON – The head of a civil rights and legal services advocacy group wants Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry to apologize for saying he wouldn’t be upset if he could be known as the second black president.

“John Kerry is not a black man — he is a privileged white man who has no idea what it is in this country to be a poor white in this country, let alone a black man,” said Paula Diane Harris, founder of the Andrew Young National Center for Social Change.

He sure doesn’t look very black in this photo! Let’s be honest: Kerry has no idea what it is to be even a middle-class white in this country.

UPDATE: A reader points out that George W. Bush is rich, too. True enough. But he’s not quoting André Gide and posing as black!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Lonewacko notes the Toni Morrison quote from which the Clinton-as-black-President trope emerged:

…white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.

(Emphasis in original). Doesn’t sound much like either Bush or Kerry, does it?

MORE PROGRESS:

Syrian police have disrupted a rare protest by human rights activists demanding political and civil reforms.

At least 30 arrests were made during a sit-in before the Damascus parliament building, says a Syrian rights group.

The protest marks the 41st anniversary of the day Syrian Baathists seized power, declaring a state of emergency.

The dominoes are teetering.

VENEZUELA: Chavez is not only crushing civil rights, but is ruling outside the law.

He’s a dictator.

GIZMODO has an item on gadgets that I like, mentioning the Toshiba digital camera whose photos grace this page below, and the iRiver digital audio player (which I bought based on a recommendation on Tyler Cowen’s blog).

I have to say, though, that the flaw in the iRiver is that it only interfaces with a computer that has its software installed. That’s a minor flaw, though a tolerable one in an audio player. (But it makes it largely useless as a general purpose flash-memory drive, though it’s advertised as such.) This raises a general point.

Hardware should work, whenever possible, on any computer it’s hooked up to. One thing I don’t like about a lot of the high-end digital cameras is that their highest quality uncompressed files are saved in a format that needs special software to decode and convert into generally applicable formats. (Some do save as .tif files, which to my mind is better, or are capable of in-camera conversion to .jpegs. They all should be)

Most of the time stuff like that doesn’t matter, but you can bet that sooner or later some incompatibility issue like that will bite you on the ass — you’ll have a camera full of great pictures, and you’ll have some urgent need to email them, but you’ll be stuck with having each picture in a 12MB file that’s too big to email on its own and that you can neither resize nor edit because the computer with the proprietary conversion software is dead or in your lost luggage.

UPDATE: Reader Deepak Sarda points out that there’s a firmware upgrade for the iRiver that makes it mass storage compliant.

TIM GRAHAM ON TV COVERAGE OF THE ELECTIONS: “And isn’t it odd to accuse candidates of ignoring the issues when you spend every day chronicling Martha Stewart and Michael Jackson instead of Social Security or international trade?”

I’VE SAID THAT LOCAL-BLOGGING has a big future. Here’s a guy who’s doing it now, with extensive coverage of a school board election, including MP3 audio. (Via Jeff Jarvis.)

KERRY VS. KERRY ON THE WAR: Some thoughts over at GlennReynolds.com.

A SERIOUS THREAT TO ACADEMIC FREEDOM at the University of Southern Mississippi. Ralph Luker has a roundup with lots of links.

Who do they think they are, Penn State?

THE BOSTON GLOBE REPORTS on a nanotech gold rush, as states chase potential future markets — and current federal research dollars.

It’s too bad that so few of those current research dollars are directed toward actual nanotechnology.

PROTEIN WISDOM is back! We missed you, Jeff!

Why? Just read this Ted Rall obituary.

INTERESTING OBSERVATION on the Martha Stewart case:

Amidst all the comment on the Martha Stewart case, I think the most important point has been missed: the law under which she was convicted is a bad law. I don’t mean the securities laws— that malicious and silly charge was kicked out by the judge. Essentially, what she was found guilty of was lying to policemen. I don’t think that should be a crime– and certainly not with a five-year sentence.

On the statute in question, 18 USC 1001, the “False Statements Act,” I highly recommend my former colleague Peter W. Morgan’s article, The Undefined Crime of Lying to Congress: Ethics Reform and the Rule of Law, 86 Nw U L Rev 177 (1992). The False Statements Act reaches more (a lot more) than just lying to Congress, and his article surveys its history and some of its abuses.

Eugene Volokh has more: “Cases such as Martha Stewart’s may discourage people (even innocent people) from talking to federal authorities at all, because they might fear that some error on their part may be characterized as a lie, and might thus mean criminal punishment.”

(Via Prof. Bainbridge).