RICK HASEN looks at blogging, election law, and the F.E.C. More thoughts here, from Eugene Volokh.

“I AM NOT SADDAM HUSSEIN:” Heh.

MORE FROM THE INDIAN BLOGOSPHERE: Blog Mela is up!

HERE’S VIDEO OF JEFF JARVIS’S BLOG ROUNDUP on MSNBC’s Connected Coast to Coast.

GAIL COLLINS AS LAWRENCE SUMMERS? The answer is left as an exercise for the reader.

SURPRISINGLY DEEP THOUGHTS from The Manolo.

ECONOBLOGGING ALL AROUND: This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up.

UPDATE: The link wasn’t working for some people (though it did for me). The new one should, though.

LEBANON UPDATE:

BEIRUT (AFP) – Up to 150,000 opposition supporters rallied in Beirut three weeks after the murder of ex-premier Rafiq Hariri as Syria prepared for a troop pullback in Lebanon in the face of international pressure.

Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Were the protesters inspired by Ward Churchill? Heh.

IN THE MAIL, II: A copy of Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior, coauthored by longtime InstaPundit reader Catherine Johnson. Not really up my alley, but it looks quite interesting.

UPDATE: Blog-review here.

IN THE MAIL: A reprint of a law review article by my former student Nathan Canestaro, in the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, entitled: “‘Small Wars’ and the Law: Options for Prosecuting the Insurgents in Iraq.” It doesn’t seem to be online, but here’s the abstract:

This Article contrasts the various bodies of law and venues under which Iraqi insurgents could be prosecuted. The ambiguous nature of an insurgency as a legal concept complicates efforts to apply traditional judicial methods. Insurgencies straddle several different bodies of law: As a limited conflict between a non-state actor and an occupying power, they are something less than a war but something more than criminal conduct. As a result, none o fthe options for prosecution is well suited to the task, and each has significant political or practical shortcomings.

It certainly looks interesting.

BILL QUICK’S FATHER HAS DIED: Please send him your condolences.

BILL RICHARDSON: Neo-Con!

HERE’S MUCH MORE on happenings in Kyrgyztan.

PREFERENCE CASCADES AND FOREIGN POLICY: I have some thoughts in my TechCentralStation column.

AN EMERGENCY SESSION OF PARLIAMENT in Kyrgyzstan.

HOWARD KURTZ has more on the seemingly endless Kinsley/Estrich L.A. Times oped sexism battle.

All I can say is that they were quite receptive to the Insta-Wife, who wrote several pieces for them on school shootings — this one in just two hours, when they called her and asked for something to run the next day after the Pearl, Mississippi shooting. Of course, that was under the old regime.

UPDATE: Here’s a suggestion that Estrich should start a blog.

FORMER SPINSANITY GUY BRENDAN NYHAN is unimpressed with Robert Byrd’s latest: “The whole article is a rhetorical sleight of hand where filibusters are equated with “free speech,” even though (a) legislators don’t have a right to unlimited debate, (b) the modern filibuster usually ends debate on an issue, and (c) Byrd speaks for hours on the Senate floor.”

THINKING OF BECOMING A LAW PROFESSOR? Some good advice, and links to much more information, here. I’ll just add this: I’m either a member of, or the chair of, our appointments committee most years, and though it’s undoubtedly true that where you went to law school matters (Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Chicago, etc. are better launching pads than, say, Tennessee, though several of my former students are now law professors) it’s come to matter to me less. Some of our best hires in recent years came from schools outside the usual feeder network, and I suspect that many other schools have had similar experience. Orin Kerr is right, too, that persistence matters. Becoming a law professor is a long, hard road no matter where you went to law school.

WE’VE HEARD THIS SONG BEFORE:

If any doubts remained about President Hugo Chávez’s plans for Venezuela’s destiny, they have been erased by his decree to “rescue” unproductive lands and assign them to “groups of the population” and “organized communities” from rural areas. Private property is history, so Chávez is proceeding to strengthen the failed agrarian reforms of socialist Venezuelan governments from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, renaming them the “agrarian revolution.”

The new Land Law authorizes the government to expropriate land that bureaucrats consider underutilized and to do the same in those cases in which the government discovers an error in a title of land. Venezuelans already know the modus operandi of Chávez’s bureaucracy. In trying to obtain a birth certificate, an identification card, a passport, a certified copy of any legal document and even in registering the elderly to receive pensions, each “mistake” represents a potential source of income for each official, and at the same time, a delay of several months for each citizen’s request.

Let’s hope it works out better than Robert Mugabe’s similar program in Zimbabwe. But the tune sounds awfully familiar.

UPDATE: The Bolivian government has been toppled.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Bart Hall emails:

Chavez’s agents have been heavily involved in trying to bring about a Castro-style revolution in Bolivia for the last three years. I have worked in Bolivia a couple of times (agricultural) development, and the communist meddling is a very unfortunate situation. I could say a LOT more, but I’ll leave it that the Bush administration has been dreadfully negligent in addressing the security issues to our south and remains far too focused on drugs.

It will eventually cost us some serious grief, given that Chavez, FARC in Colombia, and Hizb’allah are now working together.

I’m afraid this is right.

THE GIULIANA SGRENA STORY: I keep getting emails from snarky leftists saying that it proves Eason Jordan right. Except that if she were “targeted for assassination” by the U.S. military, she’d be, well, dead, instead of serving as an anti-American celebrity. I suspect that, beyond the accidental parts, this story is about as genuine as the Jenin “massacre.” Was it shocking that she was fired at? By her own admission just before it was fired on at the checkpoint the car was going so fast that it nearly lost control. “The car kept on the road, going under an underpass full of puddles and almost losing control to avoid them. We all incredibly laughed. It was liberating. Losing control of the car in a street full of water in Baghdad and maybe wind up in a bad car accident after all I had been through would really be a tale I would not be able to tell.”

Of course, she also claims that she was fired on by tanks. Amazing that there’s anything left. . . One needn’t engage in mystery-novel speculation to be suspicious of this story, and I am. As Jeff Goldstein notes:

Who is Giuliana Sgrena that the US would care enough to attempt to assassinate her? A foreign reporter with a well-known leftwing political agenda that would color any story she told anyway? Why is she important? Why would she be targeted? Why?

Why, indeed? One suspects that a lot of people are happy to have a story they can use to take some of the bloom off events in Iraq, regardless of what liberties have to be taken with the truth.

Joe Gandelman has a lengthy and skeptical take, with far more background and context than I’ve seen in any of the news reports. Meanwhile, Mickey Kaus offers a constructive, non-conspiratorial critique of U.S. roadblock policy.

Meanwhile, here’s a less-celebrated Italian hostage. Worth remembering, by way of contrast.

UPDATE: The story’s already looking more like Italian ineptitude rather than American conspiracy:

ROME — Italian agents likely withheld information from U.S. counterparts about a cash-for-freedom deal with gunmen holding an Italian hostage for fear that Americans might block the trade, Italian news reports said yesterday.

The decision by operatives of Italy’s SISMI military intelligence service to keep the CIA in the dark about the deal for the release of reporter Giuliana Sgrena, might have “short-circuited” communications with U.S. forces controlling the road from Baghdad to the city’s airport, the newspaper La Stampa said.

But it’ll get the usual attention from the usual suspects.

LEBANON UPDATE:

Without much publicity, France has moved the replenishment ship Var to the eastern Mediterranean. The Var contains facilities for running commando operations, as well as facilities for about 200 commandoes and their equipment. France apparently believes that the situation in Lebanon is going to get out of control. Since World War II, France has been something of a big brother for Lebanon, especially the Lebanese Christians. This particular relationship goes back some 800 years, to the time of the Crusades. Currently, the Lebanese are out in the streets protesting the continued presence of Syrian troops in the country. If France is going to get involved, it won’t be with a lot of troops. But you can do a lot with a hundred or so commandoes.

Hmm.

UPDATE: Less strategic thoughts, at Catallarchy.

ANOTHER UPDATE: It occurs to me that this will be a test of whether “people power” can manage to free an Arab country without the kind of assistance customarily provided by the U.S. Marines.