AN ARMY OF TWO: “Brother, Sister join National Guard.”

ME AND ANDREW SULLIVAN, in Congressional testimony?

A LOOK AT POLICE REPORTING, in Iraq and America.

SANFORD LEVINSON:

One of the ill-concealed subtexts of my book Our Undemocratic Constitution is that my colleagues in the legal academy pay much too much attention to the rights-conferring parts of the Constitution (which are often exactly what Madison predicted they would be, “parchment barriers” that are all too permeable given the right degree of public panic and malleable judges) and too little attention to the “hard-wired” structural features that, I now believe, explain much more about the actualities of American politics than do the clauses that law professors fixate on.

Read the whole thing.

MY EARLIER SWISS ARMY KNIFE POST has produced a lot of emails saying things to the effect that, “That’s not a knife. Now this is a knife.” It’s also gotten a lot of email from people who say that the Leatherman is the way to go. I stand by my original reasoning.

My brother is a big Leatherman fan, but I’ve always been more a Swiss Army kind of guy. It’s a source of strain between us. . . . Well, jokes, anyway. Maybe one day I’ll compromise on the Gerber, or maybe one of these.

UPDATE: Reader Joshua Gitlitz emails that there’s no way my brother can top this.

BUT THEY SUPPORT THE TROOPS: “‘Peace’ Advocates Vandalize Cars at Army Recruiting Station.”

JAMIL HUSSEIN: Still a mystery, despite all the digging. I don’t see any way for this to reflect well on A.P., whose prize source remains unidentified.

JAMES KIRCHICK on Zimbabwe.

“You can’t go to Disney World and impersonate a Disney character. And yes, Santa is a Disney character… isn’t he?”

No.

IT’S ABOUT TIME: Marching to Mecca for gay rights!

AN ELECTORAL SETBACK FOR AHMADINEJAD, even though student protesters are in hiding from his thugs.

THE BLOGS VS. JOHN MCCAIN: I think that John McCain realizes that bloggers are unhappy with him over McCain-Feingold — he said as much in our podcast interview — but I don’t think he grasps just how unhappy, or how much this hurts him. I suspect that (at least some of) his staff does, though. But what can he do about it?

MICHAEL FUMENTO says that the avian flu threat is exaggerated. I certainly hope he’s right, but it’s worth pointing out that most preparations for avian flu will also be valuable in the event of other dangerous epidemics. And the argument that no such epidemics are likely in the next couple of decades seems to me to be rather weak. How would we know? It also seems hard to argue that we’re overprepared for disasters generally. So while short-term planning aimed specifically at avian flu may not be as important as we thought a couple of years ago, overall planning for public health (and other) emergencies is still in a sad state.

UPDATE: Fumento prefers this link to the version of the article with hyperlinks that’s on his website. He also stresses that he never meant to say that no epidemics are likely in coming decades — and I never meant to suggest that he did. Just to be clear on both points.

TEN YEARS IN PRISON for consensual oral sex between a 17-year-old and a 15-year old?

I agree with Eugene Volokh that this sounds unjust. What’s more, were the genders reversed I doubt that it would even have been prosecuted.

DUKE RAPE UPDATE:

In last Friday’s court session, Dr. Brian Meehan admitted that he and Mike Nifong entered into an agreement to intentionally exclude from his report any mention that DNA tests had discovered results from five unidentified males in the accuser’s rape kit.

Meehan also conceded that the decision reached by Nifong and him violated his company’s protocols. It also ran counter to the Supreme Court’s Brady decision and North Carolina’s Open Discovery law. The former requires the state to turn over all exculpatory evidence to the defense; the latter requires the prosecution to turn over all evidence to the defense.

Despite this revelation, there has been no sign that the North Carolina State Bar has abandoned its passive approach regarding Nifong’s misconduct. Meehan, however, might face a different fate.

His lab is accredited by the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors/Laboratory Accreditation Board (ASCLD/LAB). I emailed the board to ask if it planned to investigate Meehan’s accreditation status in light of Friday’s testimony.

Follow the link for more, and for that matter just visit K.C. Johnson’s blog and keep scrolling. Meanwhile, reader John Griffin emails: “Bet we hear, when all is said and done, that Mike Nifong has checked into a detox unit and blames his addiction to (fill in the blank) as the reason for his ‘irrational exuberance’ in the pursuit of the Duke students. Wonder what Duke’s President will offer up as an excuse.”

MORE THOUGHTS on force strength and structure. And read this post from Donald Sensing, too.

UPDATE: James Joyner weighs in.

BUT WE’RE WAY BEHIND ON HYPOCRISY PRODUCTION: E.U. vs. U.S.A. on CO₂.

JOHN FUND: Why Barack Obama may not run.

FIVE MACGYVER TRICKS FOR OUTDOOR SURVIVAL, plus an interview with Laurence Gonzalez, author of Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why.

NEWSWEEK reports that Iraq’s economy is booming. (“there’s a vibrancy at the grass roots that is invisible in most international coverage of Iraq.”) That’s old news for readers of StratgyPage, of course.

IN THE MAIL: Robert Dierker’s The Tyranny of Tolerance: A Sitting Judge Breaks the Code of Silence to Expose the Liberal Judicial Assault. While I think that there’s something to claims of judicial bias, this book seems a bit overwrought to judge from the title and jacket copy, something you can see for yourself if you follow the link.

STANDING UP AGAINST ILLEGAL GUN SALES:

There’s someone out there telling folks to buy guns illegally, and I think it’s time we put a stop to it. He’s directing contract employees to walk into gun stores, lie on the paperwork about who’s buying the gun, and walk out after making a straw purchase.

Even worse, he’s bragging about what he’s doing. He’s holding press conferences to tell the world about what he’s done, but so far law enforcement doesn’t seem to be listening.

Well, I think it’s time we help out the ATF agents that enforce our nation’s gun laws. We need to call their Illegal Gun Hotline at 1-800-ATF-GUNS (that’s 1-800-283-4867) and alert them to this illegal firearms activity. Tell them that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is hiring private investigators to initiate straw purchases in several states, and you want them to enforce the law.

Heh.

PROFESSOR JOHN BANZHAF emails (okay, it’s a mass-email aimed at the media) that Durham D.A. Mike Nifong may have legal problems:

As the rape case against three Duke lacrosse players continues to unravel, and instances of apparent prosecutorial misconduct multiply, it appears increasingly likely that the accused students will be able to recover civil damages against the county and perhaps also the district attorney, says the public interest law professor who has successful orchestrated legal actions against several major governmental figures, including former Vice President Spiro T. Agnew.

“Although prosecutors generally enjoy absolute immunity from civil liability for violating the constitutional rights of defendants, there are instances — and this may well be one of them — where that immunity doesn’t apply,” says Law Professor John Banzhaf. Moreover, Durham County, NC, does not have absolute immunity, and so the county could be held liable for millions of dollars in civil damages even if District Attorney Michael Nifong is protected from law suits, notes Banzhaf.

I think it’s a bit early to start talking about that, but with the stuff that’s coming out you can bet that some people in Durham County are starting to think about it. As a more general matter, I also think that the notion of absolute immunity for prosecutors — a whole-cloth creation of judicial “activism” that one seldom hears about from critics of activist judges — should also be rethought.

WHEN I WAS GRADING LAST NIGHT, I was pretty sympathetic to this proposal: “In the law school world, maybe we could revive Saturnalia by having students and professors switch places for a day. I sure hope that some students might want to do my job this week, so that they can enjoy the process of grading the large pile of exams on my desk:).”

UK HATE CRIMES turn out to be directed disproportionately at one religion.