DALE CARPENTER LOOKS AT THE HATE-CRIMES TEMPTATION:

Aside from punishing offenders — which should happen anyway under existing law and which could be enhanced without creating special categories of protection — the purpose of a hate crimes law seems entirely symbolic. While I’m not unmoved by the symbolic value of law, I’m opposed in principle to criminal laws of purely symbolic value. Opposition to purely symbolic criminal laws was a good reason, for example, to oppose sodomy laws, which were a largely symbolic (and very partial) reinforcement of traditional sexual morality. . . .

No doubt national gay-rights groups are looking for some kind of win early in the new Congress to show long-suffering donors they can be effective. Winning on hate crimes may also reassure members of Congress that they can vote for a pro-gay bill without serious repercussion. Other important issues — like a federal employment protection bill and repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” — are on the horizon. An “anti-crime” measure is the easiest first step to take and may actually get President Bush’s signature, leading to more progress later.

But I am concerned that passing this seemingly symbolic bill may instead give the new Congress a “pass” — freeing it to avoid the harder and far more consequential questions of employment, military service, and protecting gay families in the law. These are all issues about which Congress really can do something of practical value.

Read the whole thing. The “hate crime” approach has been a disaster in Europe, and I think it would be a mistake to emulate it here. We discuss this topic with Presidential candidate Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) in our Glenn and Helen Show podcast that will be up later this morning.

WELL, DUH: “More Tennessee women carry guns.” Nice to see this bit, though:

Officials from the Tennessee Department of Safety say it is not clear why women have signed up to carry handguns at such an increased rate the past two years. Before 1996, local sheriffs’ offices issued the permits.

But gun experts, such as Barbara Oonk of Nashville, say that women are increasingly exercising their gun ownership rights in light of concerns about crime.

“Why should we not have something to protect ourselves?” said Oonk, the Tennessee representative for the Second Amendment Sisters, a national organization promoting female gun ownership. “Why should we let someone else have their way, when you could protect yourself?

“There is so much crime going on, and it is proven that states that have carry laws see less crime. If everybody is carrying, there would be less crime.”

There was a time when passages like this wouldn’t have made it into mainstream media.

THE MUDVILLE GAZETTE LOOKS AT DEFENSE PORK, with a Walter Reed twist.

SONY UNVEILS A FREE VIRTUAL WORLD for owners of the PlayStation 3. It’s sort of like Second Life:

Comparable to Second Life, PlayStation Home is a virtual community of PS3 owners living together in both public and private environments. Users will be able to login, chat with both text and speech and play casual games together such as pool, bowling and even embedded arcade machines. And when the old stand-bys grow stale, users can invite one another into other PlayStation Network titles outside of PlayStation Home.

Every user will have their own virtual apartment to decorate with furniture, their trophies from various games (see: achievements) and content from their own PS3s. For example, Phil Harrison took a snapshot of us in the crowd, slapped it onto a USB stick and right into a picture frame in his virtual flat. Not content at just images, users will also be allowed to share both music and videos with friends inside their private homes, which will most likely lead to some sort of underground pornography syndicate on the PlayStation Network.

Follow the link for photos and video. I have to say, it looks pretty cool. Put this together with Sony’s Internet HDTV project and it’s clear that they’re pushing into the Internet in a big way. The PlayStation 3 still seems kind of hard to get, though.

NEO-NEOCON EXPLAINS how to do podcasting on the cheap. And the product is pretty good!

GOOD NEWS:

A former Iranian deputy defense minister who once commanded the Revolutionary Guard has left his country and is cooperating with Western intelligence agencies, providing information on Hezbollah and Iran’s ties to the organization, according to a senior U.S. official.

Ali Rez Asgari disappeared last month during a visit to Turkey. Iranian officials suggested yesterday that he may have been kidnapped by Israel or the United States. The U.S. official said Asgari is willingly cooperating. He did not divulge Asgari’s whereabouts or specify who is questioning him, but made clear that the information Asgari is offering is fully available to U.S. intelligence.

The mullahs can’t be happy about this.

A RIGHT TO VIDEOTAPE PUBLIC MEETINGS in New Jersey. Makes sense to me.

GIULIANI IN THE LEAD: “A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows that among Republicans, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has climbed into a solid lead for his party’s nomination for the White House. Boasting support across his party’s ideological spectrum, Mr. Giuliani leads Arizona Sen. John McCain by 55% to 34% in a head to head match of the two top Republican candidates.” But it’s early yet.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Here’s some good news:

Tax money spent on small projects that only benefit one congressional district or region are often slipped into legislation at the 11th hour — a time-worn and much criticized part of Congress known as pork-barrel spending.

Each year the Citizens Against Government Waste exposes that pork in its annual “Congressional Pig Book.” The group had no problem sniffing out the pork this year, although it says it “will be a smaller pig than usual.”

The private, nonpartisan organization says that reduction is a welcome change from past pork-barrel spending levels.

Why the change in 2006 spending? Partly because only two of the 11 proposed spending bills were passed last year, giving legislators fewer places to hide the pork. Also, the new Democratic Congress enforced a moratorium on earmarks, the projects that members slip into appropriations legislation usually without the full scrutiny of Congress.

Pelosi has been pretty good on pork so far. Let’s hope she sticks with that. And certainly the overall reduction in pork is good news.

UPDATE: Does PorkBusters deserve more credit than the ABC article gives it? Probably, but I was trying to be modest . . . .

OXLEY recants. No word yet from Sarbanes . . . .

IOWAHAWK OFFERS a dialogue on civility. Featuring Ann Coulter and Bill Maher.

“BY GEORGE W., I think she’s got it.”

CLINTON LIED, PEOPLE DIED: Over at AlterNet, a lefty critique of Hillary Clinton on the war:

Hillary Clinton knew years before she voted for the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein didn’t have WMDs — Bill Clinton lied about Iraq’s weapons programs to justify attacking the country in 1998. . . . While many Americans today condemn the Bush administration for misleading them with false claims of unsubstantiated threats which resulted in the ongoing debacle we face today in Iraq (count Hillary among this crowd), few have reflected back on the day when the man from Hope, Arkansas sat in the Oval Office and initiated the policies of economic sanctions-based containment and regime change which President Bush later brought to fruition when he ordered the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Well, that part’s certainly true, as the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 illustrates. But he says that like it’s a bad thing.

UPDATE: Reader Jon Deur emails:

When you said “that part’s certainly true” were you including the notion that “Hillary Clinton knew years before she voted for the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein didn’t have WMDs — Bill Clinton lied about Iraq’s weapons programs to justify attacking the country in 1998”? There seem to be more people who are buying into the notion that Bush lied—and so did everyone before him. It’s preposterous. Care to clarify your post?

I meant the part about regime-change as a policy originating with Clinton. Sorry — that seemed obvious to me.

ANTHONY LEWIS: “I do not think the press can have both the Sullivan decision and a privilege not to testify in civil cases. Otherwise the decision would be a license for reckless or even deliberate falsification, which the author of the Sullivan opinion, Justice William J. Brennan Jr., certainly did not favor.”

But read the whole thing.

SITTING ON THE STORY at the Nashville Tennessean.

Plus, “carbon offsets” as an employee benefit? I think I’d prefer a dental plan.

UPDATE: Here’s the Nashville Scene article.

HOCKEY FANS AT GITMO, with John Ondrasik, who played for the troops at Guantanamo Bay. Plus, “an iguana the size of my five-year-old daughter.” Ondrasik is writing a regular column for Sports Illustrated’s website now. You can hear our podcast interview with him here.

MORE ON THE WISCONSIN STORY at Inside Higher Ed.:

Certain kinds of statements “trigger fast reactions,” Knight said. “There have been occasions when the reactions were well founded,” he said. “But there have been others that were not well founded or were somehow in between, so a dose of prudence and caution is always useful.”

Knight said he was not bothered by administrators acknowledging the pain felt by those offended by something alleged to have been said — the pain being real even if the person never said the words in question. But Knight said he worried about holding forums for people to express their pain when the facts were still being gathered, as happened at Wisconsin. “That can create its own dynamics, which is a problem,” he said. “In creating a forum, inevitably that will suggest that there is a real problem. The forum is not being held to discuss a perception, but what seems to be a reality i.e. that someone has said something that is racist or sexist or vilely offensive.”

He added that while it is “laudable for administrators to pay heed to community sentiments, that can come at a quick and high cost to the sense of freedom necessary for faculty to teach controversial and sensitive subjects.”

Administrators with a bit more backbone would be nice, too. Law schools are supposed to understand due process.

GREEN ENERGY FROM underwater wind turbines.

Plus, Tim Blair takes on “abundance denialists.”

THE WASHINGTON POST ON THE LIBBY PROSECUTION:

The fall of this skilled and long-respected public servant is particularly sobering because it arose from a Washington scandal remarkable for its lack of substance. It was propelled not by actual wrongdoing but by inflated and frequently false claims, and by the aggressive and occasionally reckless response of senior Bush administration officials — culminating in Mr. Libby’s perjury.

Mr. Wilson was embraced by many because he was early in publicly charging that the Bush administration had “twisted,” if not invented, facts in making the case for war against Iraq. In conversations with journalists or in a July 6, 2003, op-ed, he claimed to have debunked evidence that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger; suggested that he had been dispatched by Mr. Cheney to look into the matter; and alleged that his report had circulated at the highest levels of the administration.

A bipartisan investigation by the Senate intelligence committee subsequently established that all of these claims were false — and that Mr. Wilson was recommended for the Niger trip by Ms. Plame, his wife. When this fact, along with Ms. Plame’s name, was disclosed in a column by Robert D. Novak, Mr. Wilson advanced yet another sensational charge: that his wife was a covert CIA operative and that senior White House officials had orchestrated the leak of her name to destroy her career and thus punish Mr. Wilson.

The partisan furor over this allegation led to the appointment of special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald. Yet after two years of investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald charged no one with a crime for leaking Ms. Plame’s name. In fact, he learned early on that Mr. Novak’s primary source was former deputy secretary of state Richard L. Armitage, an unlikely tool of the White House. The trial has provided convincing evidence that there was no conspiracy to punish Mr. Wilson by leaking Ms. Plame’s identity — and no evidence that she was, in fact, covert.

It would have been sensible for Mr. Fitzgerald to end his investigation after learning about Mr. Armitage. Instead, like many Washington special prosecutors before him, he pressed on, pursuing every tangent in the case.

Indeed. (Via Extreme Mortman). I suspect that the press will come to regret the precedent set here.

UPDATE: More thoughts here — plus, waiting for David Gregory.

BACKSTAGE AT THE SECULAR ISLAM SUMMIT: A video report from Andrew Marcus.

UPDATE: Motionbox video player removed because it was slowing page loads for some people. You can still see the video by following the link above, and I highly recommend it.

EMBRACE THE MACHINE!

An ethical code to prevent humans abusing robots, and vice versa, is being drawn up by South Korea.

The Robot Ethics Charter will cover standards for users and manufacturers and will be released later in 2007.

It is being put together by a five member team of experts that includes futurists and a science fiction writer.

The South Korean government has identified robotics as a key economic driver and is pumping millions of dollars into research.

“The government plans to set ethical guidelines concerning the roles and functions of robots as robots are expected to develop strong intelligence in the near future,” the ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy said.

Interesting. Remember, robots are people too — or at least they will be someday!

TALKING ABOUT a Libby pardon?

JOHN ROSENBERG: The New York Times,The Nation, et. al. Were Right!

NORAH VINCENT’S BOOK, Self-Made Man, is now out in paperback. You can hear our podcast interview with Norah here.

PANIC IN TEHRAN: “The disappearance and possible defection of former Iranian deputy defense minister Ali Reza Asgari has the Iranian government deeply worried — and for good reason. . . . Asgari’s disappearance is a sign that cracks are appearing in Iran’s intelligence community. The very fact that someone as senior as he was able to disappear without a trace, is in itself a signal that the regime may be losing its grip on observation and security of major human assets.” Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Here’s more from Jules Crittenden.