ERIC SCHEIE ON WINDSHIELDS, BAMBI, AND ROBERT BYRD.

K.C. JOHNSON ON the real Ward Churchill scandal:

Beyond illustrating the flawed conception of academic freedom too prevalent in the contemporary academy, the Churchill case illustrates what happens when universities abandon excellence as the primary criterion in the personnel process. Well before Churchill ever uttered his “Little Eichmanns” line, the University of Colorado – a Tier I research university – had hired, then tenured, and then promoted to department chairman a woefully underqualified academic charlatan. In this respect, the affair provides a case study of “diversity” hiring practices gone awry.

And the result was trouble.

PATTERICO OFFERS a tale of airport security.

DON SURBER: “Ending farm subsidies will help win the Global War on Terrorism. Let me explain.”

FIGURING OUT WHY ROBERT NOVAK hates blogs.

“I GUESS HE SHOULD HAVE JUST BURNED A FLAG.”

RICH PEOPLE READ? Ann Althouse is unimpressed.

IS PEGGY NOONAN TURNING INTO MAUREEN DOWD? What’s the point of this column? Rich people make money in ways a WSJ columnist can’t understand? Which has something to do with salespeople being too “aggressively friendly”? Which she thinks represents something new? And then there are all those people talking on cellphones all the time. People didn’t used to do that! What’s wrong with people today . . . .? Actually, on rereading it’s more like Andy Rooney than Maureen Dowd. This isn’t a column, it’s a collection of unconnected — and somewhat crotchety — complaints. Just bizarre. I’ve written enough columns to know that they can’t all be gems, but, well . . . this isn’t one of the gems.

INDIGENOUS PEOPLE VS. ENVIRONMENTALISTS:

The Navajo president, Joe Shirley Jr., said his tribe felt similar pressure. Mr. Shirley said the plant here would mean hundreds of jobs, higher incomes and better lives for some of the 200,000 people on the reservation. The tribe derives little direct financial benefit from the operation of the existing coal-fired plants and it has not yet invested heavily in casinos.

“Why pick on the little Navajo nation, when it’s trying to help itself?” he asked. . . .

The staff of Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democratic presidential aspirant, recently issued a statement saying that the plant “would be a significant new source of greenhouse gases and other pollution in the region” and that Mr. Richardson “believes, as planned, it would be a step in the wrong direction,” undoing his proposed reductions in emissions.

Read the whole thing. Sierra Club members vote for Presidents. Navajos on the reservation do not.

PARTISANS GONE WILD.

As long as they’re not lifting their shirts in exchange for beads.

A GONZALES GRAYMAIL problem?

ANDREW BOLT looks at Guantanamo and doesn’t like what he sees.

THE KNOXVILLE NEWS-SENTINEL HAS AN EDITORIAL on the Gubernatorial Succession Committee that’s had me traveling to and from Nashville lately. It’s a good one, but the quote from me — “There’s going to be a lot of scrutiny over this process” — was actually about the process described in the proposed constitutional amendment, not the process of adopting the amendment. But it’s true both ways.

SO WE’VE NOW GOTTEN TWO COPIES OF Garden & Gun magazine in the mail. It’s not bad — kind of a Town & Country for the Southern well-to-do — part upscale Sports Afield and part less-partisan Vanity Fair or some such. It could do with a bit more gun and a bit less garden, though.

THREATENING BLOGGERS? Bill Hobbs asks will they never learn?

It’s not like they haven’t had the opportunity.

MORE VOTE FRAUD ALLEGATIONS IN FLORIDA: “Local party leaders say they found 60 instances in which people with the exact same name and birth date voted both in Palm Beach County and in New York in the November elections. . . . State and local governments are spending millions of public dollars, even dumping state-of-the-art equipment, to deliver a paper trail, hoping it brings peace of mind and confidence in voting to skeptical Floridians. Investigating complaints of voter fraud, and bringing any double-voters to justice in the land of the infamous butterfly ballot, should be a no-brainer.” I’m all for a paper trail, but it doesn’t matter if the voters themselves are bogus.

CHILLING AT THE AL RASHID.

ANOTHER MENTAL IMAGE I DON’T NEED: “If the Senators went any wilder, they’d be raising their shirts in exchange for beads.”

Is that worse than Joe Biden in a codpiece? I don’t want to think about either image hard enough to be sure . . . .

THOUGHTS ON FEDERALISM FROM FRED THOMPSON: And I certainly agree with this bit:

Law enforcement in general is a matter on which Congress has been very active in recent years, not always to good effect and usually at the expense of state authority. When I served as a federal prosecutor, there were not all that many federal crimes, and most of those involved federal interests. Since the 1980’s, however, Congress has aggressively federalized all sorts of crimes that the states have traditionally prosecuted and punished. While these federal laws allow Members of Congress to tell the voters how tough they are on crime, there are few good reasons why most of them are necessary.

For example, it is a specific federal crime to use the symbol of 4-H Clubs with the intent to defraud. And don’t even think about using the Swiss Confederation’s coat of arms for commercial purposes. That’s a federal offense, too.

Groups as diverse as the American Bar Association and the Heritage Foundation have reported that there are more than three thousand, five hundred distinct federal crimes and more than 10,000 administrative regulations scattered over 50 section of the U.S. code that runs at more than 27,000 pages. More than 40 percent of these regulatory criminal laws have been enacted since 1973.

I held hearings on the over-federalization of criminal law when I was in the Senate. You hear that the states are not doing a good job at prosecuting certain crimes, that their sentencing laws are not tough enough, that it’s too easy to make bail in state court. If these are true, why allow those responsible in the states to shirk that responsibility by having the federal government make up for the shortcomings in state law? Accountability gets displaced.

But read the whole thing. And I have some related thoughts on federalism, special interests, and accountability here.

Also, Mark Tapscott has some further observations on Thompson’s essay.

UPDATE: Ilya Somin comments: “I fully agree with Thompson’s view here. . . . However, there is a major elephant in this federalism room that Thompson doesn’t mention. He is right to note the massive growth in the federal prison population over the last 20 years, but fails to point out that most of that growth is due to the War on Drugs. As I explained here, convicts incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses represent 55% of the total federal prison population. And it was the War on Drugs that led to the Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in Gonzales v. Raich, which largely gutted constitutional limits on federal power.” True. Read the whole thing.

SIMPSONS UPDATE: A look at the science of Springfield.

“Lisa, in this house we OBEY the laws of thermodynamics!”

HOW TEXANS bailed out the British.

MORE ON THE POLITICS OF WAR.

IN LIGHT OF YESTERDAY’S POST ABOUT TV, ARNOLD KLING SENDS THIS:

Back when I had my relocation web site, we got hold of some zip-code level marketing data. When I looked for purchases that correlated with affluence, hardback books was one of the strongest.

Rich people read. Books.

I’m not surprised to hear that.

ADVERTISING AGE ON THE LATEST MOVEON STUNT: “What’s left unsaid in the AP piece is that MoveOn has been pitching this story for weeks now. . . . And if the owner of a local business has gone through the trouble of specifically buying an ad on Fox News, it’s because he wants to be there and he wants to target Fox News viewers. And such an advertiser more than likely has certain views about MoveOn. I can only imagine what the conversation will sound like when a self-appointed MoveOn monitor calls up Joe’s Bait, Tackle & Hunting Supply to say he should remove his ads from Fox News.”

SO THEY SENT ME A DVD OF No End In Sight. the documentary on Iraq that takes a rather different approach than, say, J.D. Johannes’ Outside the Wire. I was too busy — a triple deadline Friday on a law review article, a Popular Mechanics column, and a Wall Street Journal piece — to watch it. But Tom Maguire has some thoughts and comments: “I am not sure why Bush gets a pass in this movie. It was Bush’s job to know whether the reconstruction planing was getting the proper attention, focus and coordination; if Rumsfeld was putting too much effort into the invasion planning and not enough into the reconstruction phase, Bush should have re-directed his effort.” But note the discussion in the comments.

UPDATE: Phil Carter liked it.