THE JORDANIAN BLOGOSPHERE comes of age.

EUGENE VOLOKH POINTS OUT SOME ERRORS in Jeffrey Toobin’s new book. Mickey Kaus thinks that Eugene is excessively “hesitant and mild-mannered.”

MORE ON Google and privacy. “I’d be a helluva lot happier of they had started with the basic principles and mechanisms for ensuring privacy and announced those first – before releasing working code modules.”

SO I SAW THIS Waring wine chiller at Williams-Sonoma the other day, and it looked cool. But when I checked the product reviews on Amazon, they were pretty lukewarm. That’s too bad, as I like the idea.

SO HSU ME:

A Laguna Beach investment firm filed a lawsuit against Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu on Friday, claiming he defrauded investors out of at least $23 million and required them to donate to Democratic candidates.

According to the lawsuit filed by Briar Wood Investments, Hsu persuaded the company’s operator to do business with him by taking him to star-studded Democratic Party events. There, the 56-year-old Hong Kong native was praised by New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, California Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown and others, the lawsuit said.

As a condition of doing business with the fundraiser, Hsu directed investors to make contributions to certain Democratic candidates, the lawsuit said. The investors turned over tens of thousands of dollars, including $30,000 worth of checks to Clinton’s campaign on a single day.

The lawsuit is the latest in a series of legal troubles that continue to mount for Hsu.

Last week, New York investors filed a similar suit against Hsu. On Thursday, federal prosecutors unsealed a criminal complaint accusing Hsu of operating a national Ponzi scheme and reimbursing investors for donations made in their names. And on Friday, a San Mateo County judge ordered Hsu held without bail in a 1991 theft case. . . . According to the lawsuit, Waters invested with Hsu in part because “prominent persons, including Sen. Hillary Clinton, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, California Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown, national Democratic political adviser James Carville, film director Steven Spielberg, actor (Tobey) Maguire, grocery store magnate/billionaire Ron Burkle and others introduced and/or endorsed Hsu as a friend, colleague and trusted associate.”

Read the whole thing. When you do, you’ll see that these people are finding it increasingly difficult to remember ever knowing Hsu. By next November they won’t even recognize his name.

“Hsu gave you this money.” “Who?” “Hsu!” “That’s what I’m asking you!”

HOW TO OBSERVE Ramadan in space.

A VINTAGE PHOTOBLOG that’s worth your time.

JEFF SOYER ROUNDS UP candidate speeches to the NRA.

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE.

DISCOVERING cave entrances on Mars.

JAMES CAAN: “Nobody should give a shit about an actor’s opinion on politics.”

STEPHEN GREEN: “It’s somehow with a straight face that the AP reports that Jimmy Carter is as gullible as ever.”

GEE, DO YOU THINK? “UC Irvine chancellor says he ‘bungled’ Chemerinsky firing.”

THE DELUSION OF dialogue.

ANOTHER CALIFORNIA NEWSPAPER editorializes on Larry Summers:

Small but vocal minorities should not be allowed to halt the free trade of ideas that is so critical to higher education.

And what was Larry Summers going to talk about? Competitiveness.

Plus, the San Jose Mercury News on Stanford’s McCarthyism. “Universities should be paragons for the open exchange of ideas, even if they’re controversial or unpopular. And all connected with private and public university communities should protect that ideal.”

RUDY GIULIANI goes after Hillary for her MoveOn support.

BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW! “A 25-year quagmire.”

U.S. AND FRANCE agree on new sanctions against Iran.

FRANK J.: “In the Fred Thompson administration, there will be no need for the leaders of terrorist states to visit Ground Zero; Ground Zero will be wherever they live.”

Hey, do you think Frank J. fits the job description below? Only he has his own taser. . . .

UPDATE: Also, if you do tase Frank J., he just laughs maniacally and says “Beauty! Turn it up to 90 next time!”

ARE ALL RENTAL CARS BAD?

WHAT THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT NEEDS: Its own Andrew Meyers! Also, lower standards. But I repeat myself.

The scary thing is that he may well be right.

UPDATE: A “Preditor.”

THELMA AND LOUISE, the Tim Blair / Iowahawk version.

TIM BERNERS-LEE SLAMS “Stupid male geek culture.” Though this turn of phrase might win over lonely geeks: “If there were more women involved we could move towards interoperability.”

HENRY WAXMAN’S TARNISHED WITNESS. Apparently he got a Norman Hsu-level background check . . . .

IN INSIDE HIGHER ED., a bad review for the AAUP:

In any event, on purely intellectual grounds, “Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure” would have been better advised to seek a broader preliminary review. That’s because, regardless of one’s views about the propriety of bringing political opinions to the college classroom, the report is ill-executed. It takes aim at arguments that the critics haven’t made; it caricatures other criticisms; and it insists on strange premises — the most singular of which is the idea that “truth” is whatever the members of a discipline say it is.

Besides enunciating the AAUP’s dismal view of conservative scholars, the report makes one other theme abundantly clear. If we take the corporate authorship of the report at face value, the nation’s largest association of faculty members cares far more about the freedom of professors than it does the education of students. In the AAUP’s view, the freedom of faculty members is as broad and open-ended as a circus tent. The freedom of students to be taught in classes that focus on the subject at hand, unadorned by their instructors’ opinings on President Bush, global warming, or immigration — that freedom — hardly exists.

It wasn’t always so. The AAUP was founded in 1915 by Arthur Lovejoy and John Dewey, who had been moved by the firing of a Stanford University faculty member because of his political views. The AAUP made its first mark with its publication of a “Statement of Principles” that laid out a compelling account of what academic freedom should be. First sentence: “The term ‘academic freedom’ has traditionally had two applications — to the freedom of the teacher and to that of the student.” The AAUP’s founding document is primarily concerned with the freedom of the teacher, but it includes a powerful set of caveats. As this paragraph does not appear in more recent AAUP statements or as far as I can tell elsewhere on the Internet, I offer it here in its entirety . . . .

The AAUP in 1915 saw the potential for faculty members to abuse academic freedom, and it warned that for the profession to protect itself it would have to “purge its ranks of the incompetent and the unworthy” who included those who engage in “uncritical and intemperate partisanship.”

Nowadays that’s not a bug, it’s a feature!