JIM GERAGHTY ON GEORGE LUCAS:

I’m being warned about the dangers of capitalism from a man who made perhaps more money from merchandising than any other man in history. I’m getting lectured about the dangers of greed from man who authorized, “C-3POs” breakfast cereal, “The Star Wars Christmas Special” featuring Bea Arthur’s musical number, and not one but two Ewoks made-for-TV movies.

I’m being warned about the dangers of technology, and the glory of primitive cultures like the Ewoks, who are able to defeat the ‘technological terror’ of the Empire, in what is supposedly an allegory of Vietnam. Technology is bad, soulless, dangerous, and dehumanizing. Mmm-hmm. This from a man who replaced a tall man in a hairy suit, a projecting the human-eyed loyalty and sadness of Chewbacca, with the CGI cinematic war crime that is Jar-Jar Binks. A man who tossed aside the Yoda puppet, the spaceship models, the stop-motion animation of the Imperial walkers to go all-computer-animation-and-green-screen, all-the-time.

I’m being warned about the dangers of a “you’re either with me or against me” attitude, and the viewing of the world in a black and white morality, from a filmmaker who has his villain dress entirely in black, choke the life out of helpless pilots, and blows up entire planets. This from a man whose nuanced moral view required an edit to make Greedo shoot first.

Ouch.

UPDATE: Steve Silberman thinks that Geraghty is being unfair to Lucas:

Ouch, indeed. But what is strangely missing from Geraghty’s ostensible bitch-slapping of Lucas is any link to Lucas’ statements along these lines, which I assume were extrapolated from my cover article in the May issue of Wired, “Life After Darth” (Link ) and an accompanying online only Q&A (Link) . Instead, Geraghty links to Jason Appuzo’s post on Libertas, which excoriates Lucas for not condemning Michael Moore strongly enough. What’s unnerving is that Lucas was certainly drawing a line between his own storytelling methods and Moore’s in my interview — Lucas’ statements were critical, not praising of Moore, as you can see — but apparently because Lucas doesn’t share Apuzzo’s opinion of Moore as a modern-day Goebbels (that’s Appuzo’s word), the readers of Libertas quickly branded Lucas a “Moore-loving liberal.” They were way offbase, but such overheated rhetoric is *so* much easier to maintain when Lucas’ actual statements are absent from the debate.

I don’t have an ewok in this fight. I haven’t even seen the last two Star Wars movies (and I own Phantom Menace on DVD, still unopened) because, I don’t know, I just felt that the first trilogy was too good to equal.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Chris Blanchard emails:

know this is a little late, but I thought it only fair to note that Jim Geraghty’s discussion of George Lucas is a comparison of the messages in the Star Wars
films and Lucas’s own life, not a critique of Lucas’s statements in the Wired story or Q&A. Geraghty need not bring up statements Lucas made about Michael Moore (which I agree were over-interpreted), because that
wasn’t really the substance of the critique – although it probably informed the underlying motivation for writing it.

Good point.

HMM. MAYBE BIG MEDIA OUTFITS really are getting better. It took the NYT eight years to correct an article calling me “Glenn Harlan Roberts,” while the Philadelphia Inquirer took only one day to correct an article calling me “Glenn Simpson.”

And kudos to the Arizona Star, which emailed to check.

BILL HOBBS is trying to get Tennessee politicians blogging. He’s set up a new site, VolPols.com, to make it happen.

WHEN PROFESSORS LOSE IT: An interesting article from Inside Higher Education.

The tenure process is, indeed, tough. I don’t know anyone who’s lost it as a result, but most people going through it are a bit stressed. It’s hard not to be, when you’re being judged — according to not-entirely-clear criteria — on pretty much your whole professional self, and a good deal of your personal self, too. The prize is a lifetime of intellectual freedom, though, at least in theory.

At my school we have post-tenure review (I just got mine for this year — I ‘exceed expectations’ in all categories, and the blog got a favorable mention), and I think there’s more attention, and peer pressure, for post-tenure performance than there used to be. But the all-or-nothing nature of tenure evaluations is stressful.

UPDATE: In a related post, Daniel Drezner says that David Horowitz understands the academy. In a Stanley Fish sort of way . . .

IRON TEAKETTLE: “It’s Time To Sound The Death Knell For ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.'”

JOSHUA CLAYBOURN saw Kingdom of Heaven and has posted a review.

UPDATE: More reviews here and here.

VIA BEST OF THE WEB, I see that the town fathers of Pikeville, Kentucky are unhappy with the episode of City Confidential that focused on the Lillelid murders.

I found the episode — like most City Confidential episodes — to be a bit, um, dramatic. But in fact Pikeville has a lot to be embarrassed about where the Lillelid murders are concerned. As the Instawife’s documentary illustrates (the online trailer hits some of the key points), there were significant failures in the schools, the justice system, and the community that allowed those murders to take place. That doesn’t get the murderers off the hook, of course, but it does suggest that the Pikeville authorities should focus a bit on the beam in their own eyes, not just the mote in others’.

UPDATE: Not a lot of sympathy around the blogosphere.

STEPHEN BAINBRIDGE has thoughts on blogging as guerrilla marketing.

RANDY BARNETT has posted a Doug Ginsburg historical correction, and I join with Randy in wishing that Ginsburg had been confirmed to the Supreme Court.

THIS DRIVER’S LICENSE BILL may have constitutional problems:

Congress is moving quickly toward setting strict rules on how states issue driver’s licenses, requiring them to verify whether each applicant for a new license or a renewal is in this country legally. . . .

Under the rules being considered, before granting a driver’s license, a state would have to require proof of citizenship or legal presence, proof of an address and proof of a Social Security number. It would need to check the legal status of noncitizens against a national immigration database, to save copies of any documents shown and to store a digital image of the face of each applicant.

This sounds like the Printz case, in which the Supreme Court found that Congress could not similarly “commandeer” local officials by requiring them to do background checks before people were allowed to purchase firearms, even if Congress could regulate such purchases directly. The case may not be quite on all fours, as the penumbral effect of the Second Amendment may have influenced the Court in Printz, and as Congress has exclusive power over immigration, but I think the commandeering angle looks very much the same. As the Court said in Printz:

[L]ater opinions of ours have made clear that the Federal Government may not compel the States to implement, by legislation or executive action, federal regulatory programs. . . .

The Government also maintains that requiring state officers to perform discrete, ministerial tasks specified by Congress does not violate the principle of New York because it S 930does not diminish the accountability of state or federal officials. This argument fails even on its own terms. By forcing state governments to absorb the financial burden of implementing a federal regulatory program, Members of Congress can take credit for ‘‘solving’’ problems without having to ask their constituents to pay for the solutions with higher federal taxes. And even when the States are not forced to absorb the costs of implementing a federal program, they are still put in the position of taking the blame for its burdensomeness and for its defects.

I haven’t read the bill, but based on the description in the story quoted above, this would seem to fit rather neatly.

I’m not opposed to the bill on its merits — why should illegal aliens be able to get drivers’ licenses — but unless there’s something missing from the story, this seems like a major, and fairly obvious, constitutional objection. Perhaps the federalists in the Republican Congress have noted this objection and addressed it, though I couldn’t find any evidence that this was the case. If not, well, it’s another example of “Fair Weather Federalism” from the GOP, I guess. Or am I missing something here?

UPDATE: Reader Jonathan Karen says that it’s okay because it’s in an appropriations bill. I thought of that. But — at least as I read the story — it’s an unrelated amendment to the Iraq appropriations bill, perhaps done so as to ensure passage, and to limit White House opposition. (“They got a pledge from the leadership to include the driver’s license measures in a must-pass bill this year.”) But it doesn’t seem to be a conditional funding rule, unless I’m missing something.

Congress would have the power, I think, to make such action a condition for receipt of federal highway funds — it’s no more absurd than the drinking-age requirement (thanks, Liddy!) imposed the same way and upheld in South Dakota v. Dole. But if that’s what they’re doing, it isn’t at all clear from the story. And the Dole decision, which features a strong O’Connor dissent, is perhaps a bit shaky — or so I optimistically hope.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Tom Hynes notes this report that suggests Congress is acting indirectly, and probably constitutionally:

If a state opted not to comply, its driver’s licenses, even those issued to citizens and legal residents, would not be recognized as valid for federal identification purposes — such as boarding an airplane or opening a bank account. As a result, most states would probably adopt the new standards.

That would avoid the “commandeering” problem, if that’s all the bill does.

HUGH HEWITT SAYS THAT TERRY NEAL NEEDS TO MASTER GOOGLE: And indeed he does, for his critics certainly have.

STUART TAYLOR says that Janice Brown is an extremist. David Bernstein, on the other hand, says that Taylor is wrong. Jim Lindgren, meanwhile, wonders whether the notion of teaching economics without scarcity is extremist.

That last question, at least, is answerable: It’s outside the mainstream now, but it won’t be in a post-nanotechnology age, though I rather doubt that’s what Frank Michelman had in mind.

PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH WRITES on the history of the filibuster, and says that it’s not quite what many suppose.

WHAT WILL REPLACE THE SPACE SHUTTLE? Popular Mechanics has a sneak peek at a Lockheed Martin design.

I see a ghost of the old Dyna-Soar in the overall look.

GOTCHER HEALTH CARE BLOGGING RIGHT HERE: This week’s Grand Rounds is up, with post from medbloggers on all sorts of topics.

THE UNBEARABLE RIGHTNESS OF NICK DENTON: My TechCentralStation column is up. Excerpt: “On the one hand, we’ve started to see a switch: Where an earlier generation of articles on employee-blogging warned the employees about the danger of retribution from the employers, a newer version of the story warns employers about the power of the bloggers in their midst. On the other hand, it’s hard for organizations to operate when dissent becomes easier, and more popular, than actually running things or doing work.”

UPDATE: Reader Jeff Govek emails: “If an organization is such that dissent is more popular than real work, then employee-blogging is the least of that organization’s problems.”

I HAVE A REVIEW of George Gilder’s new book, The Silicon Eye, in today’s Wall Street Journal.

THOUGHTS ON THE LAST DAY OF LAW SCHOOL, by a graduating student at that other UT.

FILIBUSTERS AND THE NOSTALGIA OPTION: TigerHawk has further thoughts.

PAJAMA PARTY UPDATE: Roger Simon reports on the progress of Pajamas Media,.

A REMINDER of why Pat Robertson was one of the original models for the term “idiotarian.”

THE FUNNY THING IS, the more people who visit this parody site, the more pageviews my blogads get. Thanks, whoever!

And Condi is hot. (Thanks to RightWingSparkle for the email tip.)

UPDATE: Yes, yes, I know that somebody is just using this toy by the redoubtable Ka-Ping Yee.

THE SUPREME COURT has agreed to hear the Solomon Amendment case.

FILIBUSTER UPDATE: Mickey Kaus thinks that the make-’em-talk proposal for filibuster reform won’t work:

It might make sense, as Instapundit and others suggest, to require that Senate filibusterers really filibuster, with allnighters, cots and potlikker recipes, etc.. But it is a non-solution to the problem confronting the Senate today–which is whether a minority should be able to block a Supreme Court nominee supported by a majority (but less than 60%). It’s true, as Instapundit notes, that the “real filibuster” requirement would

ensure that the filibuster-nuke is dropped only when the stakes are high enough that the minority is willing to pay a price.

But a Supreme Court nomination is just such a case. Democrats would clearly be willing to undertake a “real” filibuster to block Janice Rogers Brown, for example. So we’re still presented with the question: Should they be able to do that? Allow “real” filibusters and the Democrats win (as I think they should).

I don’t think that’s so obvious. Allowing “real” filibusters means that you’ll get a vote someday — not even Ted Kennedy and John Kerry can talk forever; it just seems that way while they’re talking. But the more important point is that it would require the Democrats to engage, not simply obstruct, Supreme Court nominations, and to do so at length.

Of course, what Bush really ought to do is nominate a quirky libertarian judge like Alex Kozinski, thus confusing the Democrats and completely undermining their “the Theocrats are coming!”^TM campaign. Unfortunately, Kozinski — though to my mind perhaps the best Court of Appeals judge of an age to be eligible for the Supreme Court — is almost certainly too politically incorrect (read: libertarian) to fly with the Republican powers-that-be, a fact that gives the Democrats’ sloganeering some shreds of credibility.

Which means that if the Democrats were smart, instead of just grimly obstructionist, they’d be out there floating names of judges like Kozinski as examples of candidates that they wouldn’t filibuster (Eugene Volokh would be a good one, too!). This would put Bush in a tough spot, as he’d have to explain why his candidates were better than Kozinski or Volokh, which would be hard, as there aren’t many candidates better than Kozinski or Volokh, or give more credit to the whole “Theocrats” thing.

Luckily for Bush, the Democrats aren’t that smart.

UPDATE: I think it’s worth stressing that my earlier invocation of this idea was based on this post by TigerHawk, and I don’t think people should underestimate the impact of C-SPAN, etc., on these kinds of things. As TigerHawk notes, the prospect of seeing nonstop bloviation by Democratic Senators broadcast (and archived for use in future campaign ads) is sure to give the Democrats pause. At least it should, if they’re smart.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Pierre Trepagnier emails:

I suggest the real difference with abandoning the current “two-track” rules and going back to a classical filibuster is that the true filibuster brings the Senate to a halt while it occurs; a two-track filibuster is not really one at all, because the usual Senate business goes on in parallel. Actually bringing the Senate to a halt is, as Newt Gingrich found out in a different case, a high-risk gamble. The country will get fed up in a hurry, but it is not obvious in advance who will get the blame. It could be the Republicans.

Possibly, and certainly the media would spin it that way. Then again, who’s getting blamed now?

IN THE MAIL: Bevin Alexander’s How America Got it Right: The U.S. March to Military and Political Supremacy. Some might hope, and some might fear, that a book like this represents a sure sign that American power is peaking.

All I can say is, “Great supremacy, kid! Don’t get cocky.”