MICKEY KAUS: “Thanks to a recent election that gave Mayor Villaraigosa’s allies a majority on the L.A. school board, a large, poor-performing inner-city high school–Locke High–is being turned over in toto to a charter organization. Why isn’t this the equivalent, for the education world, what the dynamiting of the Pruitt-Igoe towers was for New Deal public housing projects? Here is a unionized ghetto high school so beyond salvation by the traditional ed bureaucracy that a majority of its own teachers vote to go charter!”

THOUGHTS ON POLITICIANS AND HDTV: This was discussed here a while back.

RUDY GIULIANI gets the MoveOn discount. Advertising Age has the backstory.

THE CHEMERINSKY SCANDAL: A novel solution:

Victor David Hanson says UC Irvine Law School should re-hire Chemerinsky.

Personally, I think they should re-hire him, and then re-fire him, just for kicks. It’ll be like George Steinbrenner and Billy Martin for the ivory-tower set. Fun times all around!

Who says sports don’t build character?

UPDATE: More here: “Can anyone explain why Drake should not resign? After nine months of searching for a dean and recruiting a man who is highly respected throughout the law school community, he turned around and fired him in a way that has undercut the whole project of founding a law school at UCI.”

Or maybe it’s all a cunning effort at sabotage.

MORE ON THE MICROSOFT stealth update issue. “I know that this is a bitter pill for Microsoft to have to swallow, but no matter what spin is being put on the PR, updating files on systems where users have specifically stated they want to have the final say on what’s installed is a serious betrayal of trust, and this isn’t the first time.”

BILL QUICK thinks I’m hopelessly naive.

Oh well. At least I’ve got company. Actually, lots of company.

DANNY GLOVER ON THE BLOGOSPHERE:

A-list bloggers who rose to prominence by fighting the establishment are quickly becoming the new establishment — and as such they are being forced to do battle with a new generation of intraparty peasants with pixel-forks.

The Blogway Elite versus the New Netroots (need a better name for them): It’s all very interesting to watch.

Indeed.

IF MOVEON HAD EXISTED 65 YEARS AGO.

SENATOR KEN SALAZAR PRODUCES the world’s quietest Sister Souljah moment, by denouncing the MoveOn “Betrayus” ad, but in a newspaper with a smaller readership than many political blogs.

UPDATE: Elizabeth Edwards is criticizing MoveOn too but I don’t think it counts as a Sister Souljah moment, even a quiet one, when it’s your wife doing the criticizing.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Gary Harmon of the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel emails:

Prof. Reynolds: Here I sit, damned with faint praise re Salazar’s Sis Souljah? Did you have to mention the size of the readership? Now I feel like the freshman on the first day in the locker room with the seniors. Again.

Actually, we won’t apologize for the size of our readership. It’s actually growing and not many can say that in this business. What is interesting is that the comments were made in a phone conference involving almost all Colorado media, including the big dailies and AP.

That it made it to our paper might explain why we’re growing and, well, they’re not.

As Webb Wilder says: “You’re never too small to hit the big time!”

HSU LOVES YOU, BABY?

When Bill Clinton received an award at a gala dinner honoring the late Robert F. Kennedy last year, the former president expressed his thanks before an audience that included a Nobel Prize winner and a glittering array of show business celebrities and Wall Street titans. Yet the second sentence of his remarks expressed special gratitude to a man almost no one there had heard of: “our friend Norman Hsu.”

The story of Hsu, the major Democratic fundraiser who turned out to be a fugitive from justice, is a tangled one that stretches back more than 15 years. But more recent developments in the world of campaign finance helped create the environment in which a man like Hsu could be welcomed into the company of people like the Kennedys and Clintons.

Thanks, campaign finance “reform”! (Via NewsAlert, which notes: “To Bill Clinton Norman Hsu was a bundler of joy.”)

MORE WRONG-HOUSE RAIDS IN PHILADELPHIA: And the cops even admit that they weren’t sure they had the right house, and broke in anyway.

We need federal legislation stripping sovereign immunity in these cases.

INDEED: “It is the view of this column that the Times should be able to sell ads to whomever it wishes under whatever terms it wishes. But we live in an era of heavy regulation of campaign speech, thanks in part to the persuasive efforts of the New York Times. It does not seem too much to ask that the New York Times Co. adhere, with transparency and integrity, to the high standards its editorialists seek to impose by law on everyone else.”

UPDATE: A message convergence. “But I think the real lesson here is for MoveOn: sure, you got a great discount, but if you’d waited a day you could have gotten the same message out for free.”

PRESIDENT BUSH meets with milbloggers.

WHEN POLICE OFFICERS DRIVE DRUNK.

MORE ON S.U.V. HYPOCRISY, from Arthur St. Antoine.

SO I FINISHED JOE HALDEMAN’S The Accidental Time Machine last night. It was okay — not in his top tier, but reasonably amusing. As one of the reader reviews says: “pleasant, although shallow.”

BUY A SPORT-UTILITY VEHICLE: It’s for the children! “America’s car culture may be giving childbearing a big boost. Dragging a child around a city, even a family-friendly Canadian or northern European city, is a major hassle, especially since after you get home, all worn out and cranky from the expedition, chances are your urban apartment forces you to be in closer proximity to your child than is ideal for maintaining an even temper.”

UPDATE: Note this comment, too.

MAKING THE MCLAUGHLIN GROUP LOOK LIKE A BUNCH OF BLOWHARDS: The new Corn & Miniter Show is up!

DAVID BERNSTEIN: “Anyone who is reasonably familiar with the history of U.S.-Israel relations knows that the pro-Israel community (and the organized Jewish community writ large, for that matter) has despised Brzezinski for at least thirty years. And it wasn’t just Brzezinski’s policies, deemed by many to be anti-Israel, it was the way he promoted them, and the way he interacted with Jewish community activists who sought to engage him.”

THE REAL MEANING OF “no war for oil.”

OUT-TRUTHING THE TRUTHERS: Mary Katharine Ham at Ground Zero.

HSU-LEATHER EXPRESS: Well, he’s already demonstrated that he’s a flight risk: “A Colorado judge set bail at $5 million in cash for Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu on a grand theft charge, but that wasn’t enough to satisfy a prosecutor who had asked for an unprecedented $50 million bail.”

ARNOLD KLING ON order, disorder, and markets.

MORE ON L’Affaire Chemerinsky.

CHINESE PIRATES PRODUCE AN IPOD NANO CLONE, and get this stiff warning: “Just remember guys, you’re taking food off of Steve Jobs’ table… which is made of diamond-studded platinum.”