LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES catch the regulatory bug.

PROPOSING A BLOGGER CODE OF CONDUCT:

Last week, Tim O’Reilly, a conference promoter and book publisher who is credited with coining the term Web 2.0, began working with Jimmy Wales, creator of the communal online encyclopedia Wikipedia, to create a set of guidelines to shape online discussion and debate.

Chief among the recommendations is that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments left by visitors to their pages and be able to delete threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship.

Sounds like I’m ahead of the curve already! Though that sounds more like a commenter code of conduct, really. I certainly don’t believe that deleting nasty comments is an assault on free speech. Commenters can always get their own blog — why should they have a “right” to have their comments appear on other people’s blogs. The downside, though, is that once you start deleting comments people will tend to hold you more responsible for any comments that you don’t delete. I certainly think that this prediction will be borne out: “What I foresee is endless argument about the meaning of the terms in the rules and how the rules apply. These discussions will be tedious and full of self-serving assertions.”

Meanwhile, a related issue involving the Yale Law Journal.

Plus a potentially lucrative opportunity for InstaPundit!

VARIOUS PEOPLE HAVE BEEN REQUESTING more law school patio scenes. I’m happy to oblige, though it’s worth noting that this is from last week — this week’s weather isn’t as good, thanks to the unseasonable cold snap that has brought us December in April across most of the Eastern United States.

It’s also worth noting that there’s more to the University of Tennessee than a pretty campus, nice weather, and happy students. But if you like the photos, here are some more that I took for the law school’s website a while back. And here are some older pics from around campus. Plus, some video interviews of U.T. law students, too. Students at U.T. do seem happier than law students generally, both in my impression and in that of various people who have visited the campus.

TOM SPAULDING IS REHEARSING WITH AEROSMITH: “It’s a little odd that the very band that inspired me to play guitar, and therefore eventually become a tech is now the band I work for. It’s very cool that they continue to inspire me 30+ years later.”

MORE ON THE TROUBLES AT SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY, from Cathy Young:

The SFSU flag-stomping case continues this trend. It also seems to bear out the charges of double standards. Four years ago, the university took no action when the campus was plastered with posters that showed soup cans with pictures of dead babies and labels reading, “canned Palestinian children meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license.”

She also observes: “It’s hard to tell whether the selective deference to Muslim sensibilities stems from a politically correct regard for a minority group or from fear of violent protests.”

MORE BAD PRESS for the new Democratic leadership as a result of Pelosi’s trip.

THIS IS INTERESTING:

Over half of Europeans would support a preemptive military strike to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, a poll released last week by a London think-tank reports.

But they don’t want to spend more on the military. Obviously, they want the United States to make the strike.

Plus, then they can criticize us after the fact. Win-win-win!

USA TODAY is piling on Imus. I’m with the Lady Vols fans — his comments about Rutgers were pathetic. That said, this is a bit of a feeding frenzy.

A FRED THOMPSON ROUNDUP at ElephantBiz, where they’re a daily occurrence.

MORE PORK-RELATED SCANDAL: “The scandal involving Gov. Jim Gibbons’ ties to defense contractors broadened Friday with revelations that his wife was paid consulting fees by a company he helped to obtain federal contracts while in Congress.”

IS “CRIMSONISM” the new Orientalism?

SMART, YET SOMEHOW SELF-DEMEANING: 2008 candidates buying each other’s names on Google AdWords.

MICKEY KAUS: “When all four guests on the Chris Matthews Show agree on something, it is by definition CW–therefore the CW now holds that an immigration bill will pass and be signed into law this year, perhaps without many Republican votes.”

MARY KATHARINE HAM SPEAKS TRUTH TO POWER. Always outnumbered, but never outgunned. . . .

UPDATE: Easier video link here. While I agree that the venom aimed at Michelle Malkin has largely been ignored by the usual spokespeople for civility, I do think that it’s especially notable when a tech-blogger gets such nasty comments. But as Claire Berlinski noted in our interview, she’s seen that sort of thing on the long-distance running chatboards. Lots of people are jerks on the Internet, especially when they can be anonymous, and especially when they feel that being a jerk builds credibility with the people they side with.

THOUGHTS ON IRAN:

Suppose that upon entering Iraq, our troops had uncovered a nuclear facility in which Saddam had 1,000 working centrifuges, another 2,000 about to come on line, and manufacturing capacity to produce yet more centrifuges? Would anyone have argued at that point that the invasion had been unnecessary? Do any Democrats deny that Iran does in fact have all of this capacity right now?

In the debate to come over Iran’s nuclear capacity, there will be constant references to our intelligence failure in Iraq. The dispute will be about exactly how close Iran is to a bomb. But let no one forget that Iran is already at a point that would easily have justified the overthrow of Saddam. This fact, by itself, does not decide the issue of what to do about Iran.

No, but it does suggest that we should be taking the problem more seriously. Everyone says that a nuclear-armed Iran is intolerable, but they mostly seem inclined to tolerate it rather than actually do anything, and even mild suggestions about doing anything are treated as beyond the pale. The likely consequence of this squeamishness and sloth, of course, is that when things come to a head more people will die than if we took effective action now. But that’s likely to be beyond the next election cycle, which puts it beyond the time horizon of most politicians.

THERE ARE TWO AMERICAS: One America fears its less-wealthy neighbors because they are different. The other does not.

ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE: Reader Mark Martin emails with a question about the camera I’ve been using lately:

Quick question, Professor Reynolds….

I need a camera that makes good photographs of small things—for me, bacterial colonies on a petri plates (which are about a millimeter or so in diameter). I noticed that you have been doing some “macro” photography with your Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T10 camera. How detailed CAN you get with small objects, with that camera?

It’s one thing to read reviews. You tend to SHOW what you can do with a camera, which I find valuable.

I’ll understand if you have too much on your plate to answer. If you could show off the macro abilities of your Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T10 camera in a post, I would really appreciate it.

Here it is — this is a dime, which more than fills the frame on the “macro” setting, uncropped.

Hope that helps. And yeah, the dime’s kind of boring, but I didn’t have time to do any Rick Lee -style produce-blogging.

UPDATE: Several readers also point out that you can get a USB digital microscope surprisingly cheap.

NEWT GINGRICH: Gonzales should go.

UPDATE: Paul Mirengoff isn’t so sure: “I will shed no tears if President Bush decides to sack Alberto Gonzales. But Gingrich’s suggestion that the adminstration can get a fresh start with a new Attorney General is silly. The Dems aren’t declining to cooperate with the Bush Justice Department because Gonzales mishandled the firing of eight prosecutors. They are making a mountain over this molehill because they wish to undermine the Bush Justice Department.”

GOOD QUESTION: “Under Bush, unemployment dropped to numbers seldom seen — far below the Clinton years. Clinton’s people counter with well, the stock market took off when he was prez. Wait a second, aren’t Republicans supposed to be the Wall Street guys while Democrats are the blue collar guys?”

UPDATE: Meg Kreikemeier emails:

Just to clarify the Washington Examiner piece about the unemployment numbers during the Bush and Clinton adminstrations. The White House was quoted comparing the unemployment rates at similar points of expansion. The Clinton Adminstration did have lower unemployment rates than the current low of 4.4% for the Bush Administration as this data shows from the BLS.

That said, the current economy is strong despite a cataclysmic terrorist attack, a devastating hurricane, high gas prices and incessant, negative reporting. As I’m sure you can imagine, chronic negative reporting does affect the public’s opinion even when the facts belie the media’s and politicians’ misrepresentations.

The media and naysayers will always try to find something negative to focus on like the increase in wages last year, which they complained didn’t exist until long after the labor numbers supported the trend, and which are now channeled into inflation worries.

Indeed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Related thoughts from Jonathan Gewirtz:

The stock market didn’t take off until 1997, after the Republicans won a House majority and passed a capital-gains tax-rate cut that Clinton, to his credit, signed. But like welfare reform, another popular initiative that Clinton had no choice but to go along with, it was an essentially Republican idea that Congressional Democrats blocked as long as they could. And now that we are again enjoying a strong economy and stock market, in part because of Bush’s 2003 capital-gains tax-rate reduction, Democrats who want to raise taxes by canceling that tax reduction want us to believe that Clinton was solely responsible for the late-’90s boom.

I think that this gives Clinton — and Bob Rubin and Gene Sperling — too little credit. Clinton’s economic policies were quite good, and if the Clinton Administration rode the tech bubble a bit too long and hard, well, so did a lot of other people who should have known better. In particular, the Clinton Administration’s pursuit of free trade, against considerable opposition from people on the left, was both brave and correct.

MORE: Note Gewirtz’s update, though he says it doesn’t affect his point.

A LOOK AT THE RATHER IFFY HISTORY OF CARBON-TRADING IN EUROPE:

In some ways, Europe’s program has been a success. It covers 45 percent of the continent’s emissions, 10,000 companies and 27 European Union countries. It has built registries that list carbon dioxide emissions for every major plant.

In other ways, the approach has been a bureaucratic morass with a host of unexpected and costly side effects and a much smaller effect on carbon emissions than planned. And many companies complain that it is unfair.

Nice idea in principle, but highly prone to cheating and obfuscation when put into practice. Lots more on this at Hit and Run.

HAMID KARZAI says that Al Qaeda and the Taliban have been defeated. Hope they figure that out, too.

FRED THOMPSON: Another Ronald Reagan?

That’s clearly what some people are hoping.

RICHARD MINITER IS IN ISTANBUL, looking into the Asgari disappearance.

DEPTH AND EMOTIONALITY: Bred out of the straight white males who control the press? So is that why men are turning to the Internet instead of, say, Joni Mitchell?

STEVE CHAPMAN says the Equal Rights Amendment has already happened:

One supporter of the revived amendment is Democratic State Rep. Lindsley Smith of Arkansas, who told The Washington Post, “The question I get most frequently is, ‘Lindsley, I thought this already was in the Constitution.’ ” What she overlooks is that, for all intents and purposes, it is.

In the last three decades, the Supreme Court has handed down a string of decisions overturning laws that treat people differently on the basis of sex. It required the all-male Virginia Military Institute to admit females, ordered the Air Force to provide the same dependent benefits to spouses of women as it provides to spouses of men, and struck down an Oklahoma law setting a different drinking age for men and women.

These decisions (and others) grew out of the same principle, that everyone is entitled to equal treatment under the 14th Amendment.

Actually, that’s why I’m inclined to favor passage of the ERA. To the extent it locks in antidiscrimination and universalizes it, it reduces the likelihood that courts and agencies will depart from the principle when they think it politically correct, or politically expedient. Chapman, on the other hand, fears just the opposite — that an ERA will open things up to massive judicial activism.