A PACK, NOT A HERD: Interesting roundup of efforts to organize ordinary citizens to watch for terrorist activity. Seems like a good idea to me.

WILL FRANKLIN LOOKS AT THE CAFTA VOTE by party, and notes that Democrats are abandoning free trade in greater numbers, while Republicans are embracing it in greater numbers.

SIGH. The shuttle fleet’s grounded again. California Yankee has a roundup, with photos. And here’s much more, including a reminder that the foam that’s causing the problems was reformulated for environmental reasons, which seems to have been a mistake. Meanwhile, the Russians are offering a $100 Million flight to the Moon, which has to be kind of embarrassing.

Meanwhile, Rand Simberg offers useful perspective. And on a more positive note, there’s this:

British entrepreneur, Sir Richard Branson, has teamed up with aerospace designer, Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites to form a new aerospace production company. The new firm will build a fleet of commercial suborbital spaceships and launch aircraft.

Called The Spaceship Company, the new entity will manufacture launch aircraft, various spacecraft and support equipment and market those products to spaceliner operators. Clients include launch customer, Virgin Galactic—formed by Branson to handle space tourist flights.

Cool.

ROGER SIMON: “It’s sign of our media times that the lofty Guardian has seen fit to attack the blog of a ‘mere’ Dartmouth undergraduate.”

HAROLD FORD, JR. hits a rough patch.

NEW 2008 ELECTION ISSUE SIGHTED: The “Robot Gap.” We’re falling behind!

HARRY STEIN WRITES ON the rise of right-wing cartoons. Chris Muir’s Day by Day gets a mention, among others.

AUSTIN BAY posts an email from an Iraqi friend on where Iraq is heading.

A NEGATIVE REVIEW for the Kinsley experiment at the Los Angeles Times. I think Jeff Jarvis would have been a better choice. Kinsley’s a very smart guy, but although he tried to embrace the Web, he didn’t understand it well enough to make things work. That’s funny, since he was a very successful editor at Slate, which is, of course, a web publication. But Slate was always modeled on The New Republic, really. It was never an effort to embrace the Web except in terms of distribution.

PLAME UPDATE: Tom Maguire looks at headscratchers, jaw-droppers, and buried bombshells in today’s reports.

CATALLARCHY OFFERS THOUGHTS on the upside to teenage sex. Interesting discussion in the comments.

My own thoughts on the subject can be found here.

UPDATE: Otherwise unrelated teen post here.

THE LATEST CARNIVAL OF EDUCATION is up!

RECESS-APPOINT ALLISON HAYWARD to the F.E.C.? Heh.

EUGENE VOLOKH: “Does Rhode Island State Judge Stephen Fortunato not know the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, or does he just not care? Or does he just think that lower court judges should ignore Supreme Court precedents?”

ARE WE PLAYING CHICKEN WITH AVIAN FLU? Beats me, but I don’t think the world’s public health system is up to dealing with a pandemic.

AMIT VARMA REPORTS on flooding in India.

WHY HAVEN’T I BEEN BLOGGING ABOUT The FairTax Book by Neal Boortz and John Linder? Er, because I don’t have a copy. And taxblogging isn’t a big item of mine. Maybe TaxProf will post a review, when it comes out.

DEADLY RIOTS AND UNREST IN IRAN: Gateway Pundit has a roundup.

I’VE PUBLISHED ADVICE TO ASPIRING LAW PROFESSORS BEFORE, and with the deadline to get your AALS F.A.R. forms in almost here (if you don’t know what that means, go here first), a former student who’s now on the market recommended that I link to some of my earlier posts on how the process works. Okay. Here is a short summary of the process, and here is a very important thing to avoid when applying for law teaching jobs. And here is my reflection on how the hiring process is growing less elitist.

The biggest things that candidates usually don’t understand: (1) Most schools are hiring in a particular subject area, e.g., Torts or Property. That’s the first thing people screen resumes for, so it pays to list specific courses that will catch their eye. (E.g., “Torts” is better than “any first year course.”) (2) Your resume is one of many; make sure it’s easy for people to read, and easy for them to grasp the important bits like class rank, publications, and references. When people have to plow through hundreds of resumes in a short period, it’s easy for them to miss things if they’re not obvious. (3) People notice time gaps — if you took a year off to go backpacking in Namibia, indicate that somehow; (4) Publications are important, even if they’re not in elite law journals. If you wrote the Foreword to the Supreme Court issue of the Harvard Law Review, that’s certainly better than a short piece in The Business Lawyer — but everybody realizes that people who aren’t academics yet seldom publish in elite law journals, and evidence of writing anywhere is better than no evidence at all. A depressing proportion of new hires (even at elite law schools) never publish anything; having published before makes you a safer bet.

One other difference: I remember that when I was a candidate I felt searchingly examined. Now that I’m on the other end, I feel that we know shockingly little about the people we hire. The job is a big deal to you as a candidate, but since even large law schools hire relatively few people, and keep them for quite a while, the stakes are high for the schools, too. A bad hire can really make life miserable for a faculty, so if they want to know a lot about you, it’s not just because they’re running an inquisition.

Read this post from Orin Kerr, too. And it links to quite a few others.

SEVERAL YEARS AGO at the Yale Blog Conference, I remarked that video / computer games got way too little attention in relation to the importance they have in our culture and economy. That’s still true, and I should pay more attention to the subject, but that would require me playing lots of games — but while I have nothing against games, I spend much too much time in front of a glowing screen already.

But The Escapist magazine is covering the subject, so I don’t have to. Check ’em out.