THE EASON JORDAN SCANDAL was discussed at some length on Kudlow & Cramer tonight. I’ve got video clips, plus a roundup, over at GlennReynolds.com.

And Kaus reports that Howard Kurtz will have a story in tomorrow’s Washington Post.

UPDATE: And another Davos witness appears.

JACK BALKIN looks at constitutional theories of same-sex marriage.

THE PLAGUE YEARS: Local schools have been closed because of flu since Thursday. The Insta-Wife has flu. The Insta-Daughter is just over it. (I’m okay, but taking Tamiflu as a preventive measure, since I have a trip planned later this week.) My classes are notably empty, and many of the students who are there are hacking, coughing and looking miserable.

It’s February.

MORE ON FARM SUBSIDIES, over at GlennReynolds.com.

UPDATE: Fritz Schranck has comments, too.

GARRY KASPAROV WRITES that Russia is relapsing:

Illegal expropriation is becoming institutional policy. The Duma rubberstamps Putin decrees. In the criminal courts they have brought back an old Soviet law allowing the state to confiscate the property of the convicted. Not to be outdone, tax authorities can now seize money and property from corporations or individuals without a court decision.

What is remarkable is how little official reaction there has been to Russia’s slide into despotism, while institutions such as the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) and human rights organizations are openly critical of Mr. Putin. It’s hard to think of a time and place in which there has been such a disconnect between NGO outrage and governmental silence.

Sigh. Europe has other priorities.

READER MELISSA ASHBURN notes that Iowahawk has done it again.

EASON JORDAN UPDATE: Chris Dodd comments:

Senator Dodd was not on the panel but was in the audience when Mr. Jordan spoke. He – like panelists Mr. Gergen and Mr. Frank – was outraged by the comments. Senator Dodd is tremendously proud of the sacrifice and service of our American military personnel.

So I guess we don’t need the video, now. Do we?

PROF. BAINBRIDGE looks at UCLA’s faculty diversity problems.

EASON JORDAN UPDATE: David Gergen, who was there, weighs in:

Gergen confirmed that Eason Jordan did in fact initially assert that journalists in Iraq had been targeted by military “on both sides.” Gergen, who has known Jordan for some 20 years, told me Jordan “realized as soon as the words had left his mouth that he had gone too far” and “walked himself back.” Gergen said as soon as he heard the assertion that journalists had been deliberately targeted, “I was startled. It’s contrary to history, which is so far the other way. Our troops have gone out of their way to protect and rescue journalists.”

Gergen mentioned that Jordan had just returned from Iraq and was “caught up in the tension of what was happening there. It’s a raw, emotional wound for him.”

Gergen said he asked Jordan point blank whether he believed the policy of the U.S. military was to sanction the targeting of journalists. Gergen said Jordan answered no, but then proceeded to speculate about a few incidents involving journalists killed in the Middle East–a discussion which Gergen decided to close down because “the military and the government weren’t there to defend themselves.”

Read the whole thing.

COMMENT SPAM FROM CNN? They really are getting desperate . . . .

HOMER SIMPSON AND THE LAW: Amusing, but it leaves out my favorite bit, the capital-punishment video game. Punch line: “I could have made it if I’d shown more remorse.”

HERE’S YOUR CHANCE TO win Tom Maguire’s money! By betting on Paul Krugman . . . .

DANIEL DREZNER NOTES AN INSTANTLY PULLED SUPER BOWL AD — something he discovered via a blog!

DAVID CORN: I am not a Bush mole.

I believe him.

UPDATE: Tim Cavanaugh makes the case for Corn’s being a counterrevolutionary wrecker, while the Myopist takes a far-sighted approach.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Robert W. Davis emails: “Maybe we should ask Eric Alterman if David Corn is a CIA plant . . .”

Heh.

ANN ALTHOUSE WRITES that The Nation is “not helping the argument for separating Church and State.”

ARE HOLOCAUST VICTIMS BIGOTS? Depends on who you ask, apparently.

EASON JORDAN UPDATE: Barney Frank is talking:

Rep. Frank said Eason Jordan did assert that there was deliberate targeting of journalists by the U.S. military. After Jordan made the statement, Rep. Frank said he immediately “expressed deep skepticism.” Jordan backed off (slightly), Rep. Frank said, “explaining that he wasn’t saying it was the policy of the American military to target journalists, but that there may have been individual cases where they were targeted by younger personnel who were not properly disciplined.”

Rep. Frank said he didn’t pay attention to the audience reaction at the time of the panel, but recalled that Sen. Dodd was “somewhat disturbed” and “somewhat exercised” and that moderator David Gergen also said Jordan’s assertions were “disturbing if true.” I have a call in to Sen. Dodd’s office and sent an e-mail inquiry to Gergen.

I asked Rep. Frank again if his recollection was that Jordan initially maintained that the military had a deliberate policy of targeting journalists. Rep. Frank affirmed that, noting that Jordan subsequently backed away orally and in e-mail that it was official policy, but “left open the question” of whether there were individual cases in which American troops targeted journalists.

After the panel was over and he returned to the U.S., Rep. Frank said he called Jordan and expressed willingness to pursue specific cases if there was any credible evidence that any American troops targeted journalists. “Give me specifics,” Rep. Frank said he told Jordan.

Rep. Frank has not yet heard back yet from Jordan.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: More, including conflicting stories, here. And there’s this observation: “The blogosphere is effectively being stonewalled.” Of course, that stonewalling is necessary probably tells us something important about what’s going on.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here.

MORE: This seems a fair inference on the facts so far:

Well, nobody has heard from Jordan, and the reason is that he doesn’t have any evidence to back up his charges. Instead, he and CNN want to withdraw the charges, claiming that he was misunderstood.

This certainly seems like a serious embarrassment for CNN already.

IN THE MAIL: An advance copy of J.D. Lasica’s Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation. Looks pretty good, though I hope that Lasica’s dark view of the digital future is wrong.

OUR “FRIENDS” THE SAUDIS: Fomenting hatred in the United States.

INTERESTING BILL CLINTON QUOTE ON SOCIAL SECURITY REFORM — from 2002!

When I left office, there was enough money to keep Social Security going till 2053, enough money to keep Medicare going tail 2027, through half the life of the baby boomers. I don’t know what the latest numbers are going to show but they won’t be good. If we don’t modify the tax cut to have more tax cuts now but we reinstate fiscal responsibility over the long run, we’re going to be in real trouble there. So, what’s our option? If you don’t like privatizing Social Security and I don’t like it very much, but you want to do something to try to increase the rate of return, what are your options? Well one thing you could do is to give people one or two percent of the payroll tax, with the same options that Federal employees have with their retirement accounts; where you have three mutual funds that almost always perform as well or better than the market and a fourth option to buy government bonds, so you get the guaranteed social security return and a hundred percent safety just like you have with Social Security.

(Via Jon Henke)

IT’S A COLE V. GOLDBERG SMACKDOWN!

LONGTIME READERS OF INSTAPUNDIT know that for a while I spent a lot of time on the Michael Bellesiles / Arming America fraud scandal. One of the things that burned me about that affair was that when professors of constitutional law started raising questions about Bellesiles’ book, professional historians responded rather snootily that legal scholars didn’t know anything about real scholarship, in real peer-reviewed journals. In light of that, this review by David Garrow in The Wilson Quarterly (of Peter Hoffer’s Past Imperfect) sounds a cautionary note for historians:

In context, then, the most troubling questions concern not Bellesiles’s intentions or mental processes but the unquestioning credence other historians accorded his work. Hoffer, a history professor at the University of Georgia, states that it’s “almost impossible” for any journal or book editor to “double-check manuscript or archival reference notes” so as to confirm the content, or indeed the existence, of cited records. But anyone who has ever written for an academic law review knows that unpaid student editors at those journals painstakingly review photocopies of every footnoted source. A leading history journal supported by a major university could well do the same, even if a similar practice would be prohibitively expensive for most university presses and commercial publishing houses.

The same statistical presentation of supposed colonial-era probate records that proved to be the most fanciful part of Arming America appeared in Bellesiles’s earlier article, but no professional historians raised warning flags. When questions about his book finally mushroomed, Bellesiles magnified and compounded his misdeeds by concocting a succession of increasingly implausible excuses for why he could not produce supportive documentation. The many historians who had unquestioningly jumped to Bellesiles’s defense quietly slithered away as the conclusion that Bellesiles had “manipulated them and betrayed their trust” became inescapable. The Bancroft Prize was rescinded, and Knopf withdrew Arming America from publication.

“Painstakingly” is the word, as anyone who has written a law review article can probably attest.

A RATHER NEGATIVE TAKE on the Columbia Journalism Review, in the new Washington Examiner.

YOUR WEEKLY ECONOBLOGGING ROUNDUP: This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up!

ARMED PILOTS — THE GOOD NEWS:

Two years ago, the Federal Flight Deck Officer program began training pilots who wanted to carry guns on flights to protect the cockpit.

Aviation sources tell Time that more than 4,000 pilots are authorized to carry guns, and each day they fly armed on more flights than do air marshals. The gun-toting pilots, who fly unidentified, now constitute the fourth-largest federal law-enforcement group in the U.S. Pilots in the program, as well as the Transportation Security Administration (tsa), which runs it, claim it has been a big success.

And the bad news:

But some pilots complain that the tsa has never embraced the idea, providing little follow-up after training and denying them basic intelligence data like the weekly suspicious-incident reports. “The government wants it both ways,” says one pilot. “They want us to protect aircraft, but they don’t want to pay much for it, cover us for injuries or even really treat us as law-enforcement officers.” tsa officials insist they are proud of the program and are reviewing how to offer more assistance and training.

I think it’s pretty clear that the bureaucrats never really liked this program, and haven’t moved any faster than they had to. And — as Bush’s failure to mention the program when rounding up security improvements in the State of the Union suggests — it hasn’t been a very big priority with the White House, either.

UPDATE: A reader from the Hill emails:

The opposition at TSA is much stronger than indicated by TIME. TSA has set up so many roadblocks for this program and even sent an email to pilots more than a year ago threatening them to stop complaining to Congress. Some of the highlights: They setup only one training site in the entire US, forcing pilots to take leave and pay their own way to get there. Rules in place require pilots to put their guns in lockboxes (even though Air Marshalls can carry them on their person) and force them to check them as regular baggage when they are not piloting a flight, leading to hundreds of lost guns at baggage claim. Also, pilots who sign up for the program (80% of whom are former military or law enforcement) must complete an intrusive psychological exam, on top of the one they take to be a commercial pilot. If the pilots fail the exam, the results can be given to their employer, but the pilots are not allowed to see them. The original number of pilots that signed up for the program was in the tens of thousands, but most dropped out after seeing all the hurdles and hassle that TSA has thrown up…

Sigh. That’s pretty lame. But that’s the TSA.

So how about a little White House leadership on this? Anyone? Bush? Anyone?