I’LL BE UP EARLY TOMORROW: Got to be at the hospital at 5:30, as the Insta-Wife is scheduled for early surgery. (Our daughter is with her grandmother tonight). I spent a few hours there tonight, and she’s in good spirits. I rubbed her feet, and helped her scrub her chest with Betadine.

PATRICK RUFFINI AND OLIVER WILLIS will be on C-SPAN tomorrow morning, 7:45-8:30 (Eastern) tomorrow morning. I’ve always said that Oliver was made for TV.

UPDATE: And Lance Frizzell will be on Teddy Bart’s show tomorrow morning. Listen live here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Caught the last few minutes via streaming video. Oliver: “I’m just not willing to launch a headhunting campaign against someone based on secondhand reports.”

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Oliver emails: “Now, am I willing to launch a campaign based on firsthand knowledge? You bet.”

I never doubted it.

CHARGES OF RATHERGATE CONSPIRACY AGAINST KARL ROVE, from Congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-NY). Charles Johnson has audio and a transcript. If Karl Rove is really this smart, the Democrats are doomed. (Hmm, maybe spreading that idea is the real conspiracy. Somebody ask Hinchey who he’s working for. The truth is out there! . . .)

UPDATE: Comments here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More thoughts from Roger Simon, with an interesting Karl-Rove-as-Loki angle in the comments. Or is he Coyote?

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: More background on Hinchey, here. He’s “big on gun rights.” Obviously a Karl Rove mole!

SOME PEOPLE ARE WONDERING if a CNN reporter broke the law in the course of doing a story on guns.

UPDATE: A couple of readers think this concern may be premature. We’ll see.

DOING RESEARCH FOR MY TECHCENTRALSTATION COLUMN this week, I ran across MedGadget, a sort of Gizmodo-for-medical-devices. Pretty cool.

HERE’S A VERY POSITIVE REVIEW for MSNBC’s new show, Connected Coast-to-Coast, saying that:

Connected Coast to Coast is surely (and finally) the concept that the founders never even knew they were thinking of when MS (Microsoft) & NBC joined hands for a little experiment called MSNBC. The concept was ahead of its time and MSNBC’s ‘new twist’ was years ahead of the information-flow reality…until the sudden emergence of millions of blogs and bloggers finally brought that vision into focus. So, it is only appropriately fitting that MSNBC is the outlet to first embrace the paradigm that is the new law of information flow.

I haven’t seen the show — they invited me on Friday, but I was otherwise engaged.

SHOW PEOPLE A PICTURE OF YOUR WIFE WITH A LAPTOP, and some of them comment on . . . the laptop! Reader Jason Watts emails:

Is that the Dell 700m? I just set one of those up for a doc at the medical school I work at. I am sold on that model. I have the Inspiron 8600, I was sold on the big wide screen but did not consider the size and weight, especially when you have to carry it across campus with books as well. The 700m is small and powerful from what I could tell. Plus I will hopefully attend law school in a year so the 700m will work nicely for that as well.

Bill Hobbs and reader Robert Berry also emailed last week to ask about the Dell — there’s some sort of coupon promotion going, apparently. I’ve had it for a few months now, and I’m quite pleased. Battery life with the extended-life battery (a must-buy accessory, as far as I’m concerned) is good at 5-6 hours even while using wifi or the Verizon card, which both drain battery power faster (especially the Verizon card). The display is excellent, and there are lots of ports, etc. My only real complaint is the absence of a hardware volume-control knob, and the presence of a 4-pin rather than a 6-pin Firewire port. This works fine, but it’s a nonstandard cable, and though it’ll connect to an iPod it won’t charge it.

Here’s my earlier post on the subject.

UPDATE: Bill Hobbs emails:

I just ordered the 700M with 1.8 gig, 512 mb ram, 80GB hard drive, CD/DVD burner, extended life battery and 4 year warranty with at-home service and 4-year complete care accidental damage warranty. The total was just $1553 before tax because there is a great $600 off coupon floating around. Word to the wise: Google “Dell coupon codes” to find the coupon.

He’ll like it.

THIS COLUMN BY DAVID SHAW in the Los Angeles Times adds to the bloggers-as-lynch-mob meme that a lot of Big Media folks are peddling:

Bloggers can be useful. They did a good job, for example, in bringing the Rather/CBS screw-up to public attention. But some bloggers are just self-important ranters who seem to wake up every morning convinced that the entire Free World awaits their opinions on any subject that’s popped into their heads since their last fevered post.

Unfortunately, when these bloggers rise up in arms, grown men weep — and news executives cave in. That’s much more alarming than anything Jordan said.

What’s funny, though, is that Shaw’s views on the Eason Jordan controversy seem to be exactly the same as those most commonly found throughout the blogosphere:

Although the official word is that Jordan’s resignation was voluntary, I have to believe that the top brass at CNN, instead of rejecting his resignation, as they should have done, gave him a not-so-gentle push toward the door to defuse the increasingly nasty controversy.

What I don’t understand is why they — and he — caved in so quickly. I wish he’d asked — begged, demanded — that the organizers of the Davos forum release the videotape of his panel. I can only assume that he said what he’s accused of saying and that he doesn’t want those remarks in the public domain, even if they were followed by his quick backtracking.

If Jordan did say American troops target American journalists, he should be ashamed of himself. But he shouldn’t have lost his job.

Well, whether he should have lost his job was always CNN’s decision, of course. But we wanted to see the tape. As I’ve noted before, bloggers wanted the tape made public more than they wanted to get rid of Jordan. CNN, on the other hand, decided it would rather be rid of Jordan than see the tape made public.

The funny thing, though, is that the herd-mentality among media executives will probably make the “bloggers as irresistible force” idea truer, as the result of pieces like this one, than it was before.

UPDATE: Prof. Bainbridge has thoughts on why Shaw’s lynch-mob meme is likely to catch on: “Blaming others for one’s misfortunes is always easier than considring whether one’s own conduct may have caused them. So I expect the MSM to go right on whining about blogs, even if those of us in the blogosphere really don’t have anywhere near the amount of influence we would like to think we possess.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader David Jones emails:

If the blogs are the lynch mob, and Eason Jordan was not guilty of a hanging offense, then CNN’s role is that of the cowardly sheriff who gives in to the mob. So why doesn’t the MSM investigate that? Could it be that the sheriff has something to hide?

Hmm.

SHANTI MANGALA is hosting this week’s Blog Mela. Check out what the Indian blogosphere is saying!

UPDATE: And Tim Worstall rounds up the BritBlogs.

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE IN ENGLAND: “Many hunters claimed to be staying within the law by not actually pursuing foxes, although it was not clear how they communicated that intention to the hounds.”

REPORTS OF LIFE ON MARS, noted earlier, seem to be premature.

JUST TALKED TO THE INSTAWIFE: I reclaimed the Insta-daughter from my sister, who had kept her for the past couple of nights, and we went shopping (Abercrombie!) and out to dinner (sushi!), both her choices of activities. We had a nice evening, while Helen entertained visitors from her family and mine.

We just spoke on the phone today and she sounded good — except that the hospital routine is wearing her down with the constant sleep interruptions. They really do come in every couple of hours, and while some of the stuff makes some sense, I guess — like checking temperature or even EKG — they came in yesterday, and today, at about 5 AM to check her weight. Er, why not a couple of hours later?

The people at the hospital are very nice, but this leads me to wonder what would happen if you did the equivalent of those mental-hospital experiments, where normal grad students tested out as crazy after 6 weeks in a mental hospital. If you took 100 healthy people, then put them in a hospital for 2 weeks of this sort of thing and tested them again, I’ll bet that they’d be significantly worse off. People joke about the sleep interruptions, or about the bad food, but it’s really no joke when you’re in there for a while. I wonder why they don’t do better?

MEGAN MCARDLE: “Incidentally, having read Larry Summers’ remarks now, I think it’s pretty embarassing for academia that this scandal got as far as it did.”

UPDATE: Interesting observation from her comment section: “Larry Summers, politically much more adept than his critics here, seems to have pulled off a great example of ‘rope-a-dope’ by delaying the release of his remarks. The US college professoriate is currently driving its collective credibility off a cliff. Summers helped them along by offering them a ‘door to nowhere’, and they marched right through it.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: David Bernstein comments: “I would add that if Summers’ quite measured comments have gotten him into such hot water, imagine how regular faculty, untenured faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates whose views don’t reflect the politically correct mainstream are treated, and how much their careers can be placed in potential jeopardy.”

It seems to me that this is more reason to encourage intellectual diversification at places like Harvard.

2008: THERE’S A CONDI RICE FOR PRESIDENT BLOG, there’s a Draft Condi website, and you can already buy the T-Shirt. And bumper stickers!

The juggernaut is already rolling.

UPDATE: Another Condi blog! And another! And there’s more here, and here. But not everyone is on the bandwagon.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jim Geraghty reports from CPAC: “Many folks are wearing ‘I support Condi in 2008’ buttons. Interesting…”

MORE: Blogs for Condi is rounding up examples of Condi-enthusiasm around the blogosphere.

STILL MORE: Even more Condi 2008 stuff here and, especially, here.

WIKIPEDIA WARS: Involving LaShawn Barber. (Via The Baron).

ALTERNATIVE HISTORY: Bill Dyer wonders what would have happened if the RatherGate forgers had had a clue.

ARTHUR CHRENKOFF rounds up news from Lebanon, where all sorts of things are going on.

UPDATE: And here’s more interesting stuff from East Asia.

AUSTIN BAY OBSERVES a historical turning point.

SOME INTERESTING THOUGHTS ON BLOGS AND THE BRITISH ELECTIONS:

For decades the national conversation in most western countries has been directed by a few talking heads. Newspapers play important roles but all the evidence suggests that broadcasters have possessed the greatest potential to frame public debate. British politicians have known that communicating their message depends upon getting the nod from a small number of powerful figures in the broadcast media.

The editor of BBC1’s six o’clock news bulletin can make a minister’s day by putting his department’s latest announcement at the front of the bulletin. Hearing Huw Edwards say something positive about that afternoon’s policy launch will even put a smile on Alastair Campbell’s face. . . .

But the blogosphere will become a force in Britain, and it could ignite many new forces of conservatism. The internet’s automatic level playing field gives conservatives opportunities that mainstream media have often denied them.

An online community of bloggers performs the same function as yesteryear’s town meetings. Through the tradition of town hall meetings, officials were held to account by local people. Blogger communities are going to be much more powerful. They will draw together not only local people but patients who have waited and waited for NHS care. They will organise parents of disabled children who oppose Labour’s closure of special-needs schools and evangelical Christians who see their beliefs caricatured by ignorant commentators.

All this should put the fear of God into the metropolitan elites. For years there have been widening gaps between the governing class and the governed and between the publicly funded broadcasters and the broadcasted to.

Interesting, and since the gap is probably wider in Britain than in America, it’s certainly possible that the impact will be greater — though not, I’d imagine, if the establishment media can help it.

PAUL MUSGRAVE has a roundup of developments in East Asia.

I HAVEN’T FINISHED SUPERLUMINAL yet, as events have intervened. But I’m still enjoying it. When I’m done, I’m going to read The Curse of Cain, an alt-history Lincoln-assassination thriller that’s blurbed (on the advance copy they sent me) as “Civil War fiction’s The Day of the Jackal.” It looks as if it ought to be pretty good. Yes, it’s “escape reading.” But I’ve always been an escape reader.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING PIECE BY JOSEPH CURL on the Gannon/Guckert affair, featuring interviews with a lot of members from the White House press corps who worked alongside Gannon/Guckert. It makes for very interesting reading.

Here’s more from Roger Simon.

UPDATE: More here.

LAST NIGHT wasn’t as uncomfortable as I feared. I wound up sharing the bed with Helen. Back when we were single, we often shared twin beds that were smaller than this, and it was actually very nice, and snuggly, despite the regular “wake-up-for-your-sleeping-pill” hospital style interruptions. I don’t think we’ll trade in the king-sized bed at home for a full, but it was a good way to spend the night, especially at a time like this.

As you can see from the photo to the right, Helen has been keeping herself amused. I’m home at the moment, to pick up some more clothes for her and to rescue the cats from durance vile. I’m heading back over there later, but I’m going to post a few blog entries so that you all won’t be totally bored.

And for those who asked about using the Verizon card in the hospital — given many hospitals’ strict anti-cellphone policies — I asked. They told me that it was OK. The older analog-style cellphones screw up their telemetry, and they don’t like to rely on people knowing what kind of phone they carry. But the Verizon card posed no problems, and it definitely makes you feel less isolated — especially when people are emailing you.

Thanks very much to the many, many people who have emailed. And I have to say — without taking anything away from anyone else — that I’ve been particularly touched by the nice emails and posts from people who are often on the other side of blogospheric disagreements, people like Ted Barlow, Jack O’Toole, Randy Paul, Jeralyn Merritt, and Oliver Willis. Thanks.

A WHILE BACK, I quoted Indian Country Today as saying that Ward Churchill was sought out for his views, which led a few readers to argue that this wasn’t necessarily so. But it’s looking more and more as if it’s the case, though it’s also possible that his claimed Indian ancestry was the real attraction. Either way, the University certainly seems to have been anxious to hire and tenure him.

The Rocky Mountain News reports:

Ward Churchill received tenure without the usual scrutiny at a time when the University of Colorado was anxious to add minority teachers, one player in his hiring said Thursday.

Churchill, who claims American Indian heritage, was tenured in the communications department effective the fall of 1991 – a meteoric leap from a job he had held for more than a decade in a program that provides tutoring and counseling for minority students. . . .

Bowers said Churchill was interviewed by every faculty member in communications. Professors in the department read some of Churchill’s works, but not all of them, he said.

They concentrated on Churchill’s writings about the standoff between the federal government and the American Indian Movement at Wounded Knee, Bowers said.

“He wasn’t writing general theory, he was writing specific cases. But specific cases are of interest to academics,” Bowers said.

Tenure review typically includes an evaluation of the candidate’s published works by scholars from other campuses. That didn’t happen in Churchill’s case, Bowers said.

More here:

Ward Churchill’s quick rise to a tenured position came as a surprise to the former University of Colorado official who suggested him for a temporary faculty position in 1990.

Churchill had been working for more than a decade in a program that helps minority students when then-Vice Chancellor Kaye Howe recommended him for a one-semester appointment teaching Indian studies.

Eleven months later, Churchill leaped to a coveted tenured position.

“This just doesn’t compute for me,” Howe said Wednesday of Churchill’s quick rise to tenure. “I don’t understand that.”

Tenure is usually granted only after a “laborious” process, she said.

Apparently — as Indian Country indicated — they were afraid of losing him:

In 1990, CU officials apparently considered Churchill an expert in American Indian studies.

“Ward is certainly being courted by other universities as a significant Indian scholar and teacher. It would be a shame to lose him because of a standard which may be irrelevant in this case,” Howe wrote Middleton in an e-mail, referring to Churchill’s lack of a doctorate. . . .

The documents released by CU do not explain why Churchill was able to avoid the normal process for getting tenure, which gives a high measure of job security to faculty. Scholars have questioned Churchill’s conclusions for years, and some have suggested he lied about being an Indian to land his job at CU.

I’ll bet the CU folks wish they’d lost him to another school now.

UPDATE: Ouch. That smarts.

THE VERIZON WIRELESS CARD is great when you’re stuck in a hospital. Helen, who is recovering well from her procedure, just finished checking her email and surfing. Checking my own email, I just noticed several readers pointing out that there’s all sorts of interesting stuff happening in Lebanon:

The multi-sectarian Lebanese opposition Friday demanded Syria end its military presence and called for dismissal of the government.

“In response to the policy of intimidation and terrorization by the Lebanese authorities and the Syrian authorities, the Lebanese opposition declares the launching of the democratic and peaceful uprising for independence,” the opposition said in a statement.

Very interesting. There’s also this delightful twist: “Lebanese opposition declares intifada.” Heh.

Meanwhile, I observe that hospitals are boring and uncomfortable places, something that I have noticed before, and suggest that every room should have a comfy chair and a high-speed Internet connection. This room, alas, has neither. Fortunately, I brought my own Internet connection. I wish I’d brought a chair, too . . . .

UPDATE: Yeah, one of these, maybe.