DON’T LET THE DOOR HIT HSU ON THE WAY OUT:

Disgraced Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu is to return to California today under armed guard after waiving extradition, concluding the Colorado chapter of his strange legal saga.

“I’ll be very surprised if he’s here at the close of business” (today), Mesa County District Attorney Pete Hautzinger said. “It’s my understanding California authorities will be here, and it’s my understanding he’ll be transported by air.”

Mesa County District Judge Brian Flynn ordered Hsu to be held without bond pending the arrival of deputies from San Mateo, Calif. . . .

“It’ll be very relieving to have him gone,” Hautzinger said Wednesday.

I imagine a lot of people feel that way.

ANOTHER REVIEW OF UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT, this time from The Economist.

A striking number of professors were willing to trample all over legal process in their rush to declare the lacrosse players guilty before charge, let along trial. And they did so solely on the basis of the players’ race and gender. One professor, Houston Baker, denounced the lacrosse players as “young white, violent, drunken men veritably given licence to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech”. Duke’s politically-correct faculty thus produced a mirror image of the worst racism of the South in the 1950s, when people were pronounced guilty—and denied their legal rights—solely because they were black. While all this was going on Duke’s president, Richard Brodhead, did little, if anything, to defend the lacrosse players or to criticise the faculty for its lynch-mob mentality. A university that charges students over $40,000 per year essentially abandoned three of them to the bullying of an out-of-control prosecutor.

Indeed.

MORE ON REBOUND HEADACHES: Reader Ann Scher emails:

I am longtime reader of your web site and was inspired to comment on your link to the NYT article on rebound headache.

I am a headache researcher (epidemiologist) and have an interest in this particular topic. There is some debate on the degree to which medication “overuse” aggravates headache and, in my opinion, much of the published data purporting to support this concept suffers from various methodological flaws.

Regarding rebound headache (the preferred term is now “medication overuse headache”) – to my knowledge, the only substance shown to cause an actual rebound headache in a blinded placebo-controlled trail is caffeine. However, rebound headache is a presumably short-lived phenomenon and it is not obvious, at least to me, how caffeine withdrawal headache would lead to chronic daily headache lasting for months or years on end as it does in some people.

My concern is the following: If medication overuse is not really an aggravating factor for chronic daily headache or is an aggravating factor in only a minority of people, the advice to limit treatment to a few days a week is leading to the undertreatment of pain.

Good point. Earlier post here.

STUART TAYLOR ON THE Duke rape case press coverage: “By late March, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, and Fox TV trucks were filling the parking lots, grabbing random students for interviews, turning the campus into a freak show set. The team’s 46 white members had been branded as depraved racists from coast to coast.” Read the whole thing.

NOTHIN’ BREWIN’ in the tropics.

Well, that’s good news.

OUCH: “57% of French children under five have never brushed their teeth.”

MORE FUMBLING FROM FRED.

PROBABLY OVER-OPTIMISTIC: “Cancer sufferers could be cured with injections of immune cells from other people within two years, scientists say.” But I’d certainly like it to be true.

WHY STOP AT 50 STARS? (Via TigerHawk).

UPDATE: In the comments, a devastating counterargument: “Aren’t 100 senators more than enough?”

ANOTHER CALIFORNIA NEWSPAPER is unhappy with the University of California Regents: “Even while on the verge of naming a new chancellor, UC Regents this week rescinded a speaking invitation from former Harvard President Lawrence Summers after a group of UC professors signed a petition protesting his appearance. This is what higher education comes down to here in 2007 . . . A week ago, we defended UC Santa Cruz from an online diatribe calling, essentially, for the silencing of leftists like Angela Davis. Now, we’re hearing the same nonsense, unbelievably, from the very people that we were defending last week.”

THOUGHTS ON facts and politics.

ERIC SCHEIE on erotophobia. “I think that the anti-sex wing of the GOP is colluding with the Democrats to make other Republicans afraid. Not merely afraid of sex, but afraid to talk about sex unless they condemn it.”

REPORTS FROM THE LATEST BEIRUT BOMBING: Syria would appear to be behind it. Both Syria and Iran seem to be trying to launch spoiling attacks, suggesting that they’re worried about something.

UPDATE: Related thoughts here.

YALE LAW GIVES IN: “Yale Law School will end its policy of not working with military recruiters following a court ruling this week that jeopardized about $300 million in federal funding, school officials said Wednesday. . . . Jan Conroy, a Yale Law spokeswoman, said the school would waive the requirement that military recruiters sign the nondiscrimination pledge. The Air Force already has asked to participate in a job interview program that starts Monday, she said.”

MICHAEL TOTTEN ON the next Iranian revolution.

OBAMA WAS “DAZZLING” but John Dickerson wonders if he’s doomed.

UPDATE: Jesse Jackson says Obama is “too white.” Here’s a roundup of reactions.

JAMES WEBB’S TROOP-WITHDRAWAL PROPOSAL FAILS IN THE SENATE. Yeah, it was advertised as a troop “rest” proposal, but it’s really about making it impossible to continue the surge. This is likely to produce more frustration among war critics.

UPDATE: A possible explanation for that frustration.

I READ THE NEWS TODAY, Oh, boy.

OHIO: Court may wipe out stoplight spycams.

IT’S TALK LIKE A PIRATE DAY, so it’s a good day to learn all about pirates.

SCHADENFREUDE ALERT: “Dan Rather filed a $70 million lawsuit Wednesday against CBS, alleging that the network made him a ‘scapegoat’ for a discredited story about President Bush’s National Guard service.”

UPDATE: Beldar writes: “Usually in a good juicy family court spat, you find yourself in sympathy with at least one litigant. But here’s a case in which I can just cut loose and enjoy the misery and embarrassment of all concerned!”

“UGLY ALLIANCE:” Peter Wehner connects the dots.

HARVARD COOP BOOKSTORE: Our prices are our “property” — so if you write them down, you’re stealing!

LATER: Link was busted before — fixed now. Sorry!

MARC DANZIGER: “We’re fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and debating them in Washington. Yesterday my oldest son left to join the Army. . . . Our kids are supposed to go to East Coast colleges and then to graduate or professional school, not join the military as enlisted men. In this circle, I count only one other family whose son went into the military. That’s two children out of maybe 50 or 60 families. That’s too bad; I think the elites in our society and our military would both do better if each was more closely tied to the other. In writing about U.S. politics, I talk a lot about the increasing and frightening isolation of U.S. policy, information and economic elites.”

Photo here.

THE BIG QUESTION: Who’s to blame for the anti-war movement’s failures?