DUKE RAPE HOAX UPDATE: A look at prosecutor Mike Nifong’s bankruptcy petition.

AN AMUSING TIME-TRAVEL STORY, told in Wiki discussion form.

AUTOBLOG: We’re telling you for the last time — ethanol is not biodiesel. The guy in the picture looks a bit like James Lileks, but I’m pretty sure James knows his ethanol . . . .

IN THE MAIL: Austin Dacey’s The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life.

A RACIAL-HARASSMENT NIGHTMARE: “In November, I was found guilty of ‘racial harassment’ for reading a public-library book on a university campus.” The book was an anti-Klan book, but the $106,000-a-year affirmative-action officer didn’t want to hear the truth from the janitor who was reading it. Race and class on the modern university campus . . . . Excerpt:

A friend reacted to the finding with, “That’s impossible!” He’s right. You can’t commit racial harassment by reading an anti-Klan history.

For months, I felt isolated and dejected. Yet I knew that most of the faculty, staff and students at Indiana University were good people. The campus is a growing, thriving part of Indy, where people of all colors and religions come to study.

But the $106,000-a-year affirmative-action officer who declared me guilty of “racial harassment” never spoke to me or examined the book. My own union – the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees – sent an obtuse shop steward to stifle my freedom to read. He told me, “You could be fired,” that reading the book was “like bringing pornography to work.”

Shame on the affirmative-action people and my union for displaying their ignorance and incompetence. Their pusillanimous actions, in trying to ban Tucker’s anti-Klan history book, played into the hands of the hateful KKK.

After months of stonewalling, the university withdrew the charge, thanks to pressure from the press, the American Civil Liberties Union and a group called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE.

F.I.R.E. does good work. And congrats to the ACLU and the press here, too.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Can you believe that this school spends $106K/year on a “diversity” officer and they’re so starved for work that they prosecute this case???? What other career options could a diversity offer have to drive up their pay so high?

If you want to know where higher education can trim the fat, there’s a start. You can hire a pretty good neuroscience researcher for that kind of money. :)

[Please don’t use my name. I may need a job someday.]

I recommend switching fields to diversity-enforcement. it seems lucrative, and not terribly burdened with accountability or due process.

A LOOK AT THE STATE OF academic blogging.

DANIEL HENNINGER: Obama vs. McCain: Let’s Get It On! At one time, the Wall Street Journal would have eschewed such vulgarisms, but I guess that was pre-Murdoch. Anyway, Henninger writes:

Barack Obama, the first “postracial candidate,” is heading to the Democratic nomination almost entirely because of his near-universal support from black voters in the Democratic primaries. In both states Tuesday, his share of that vote was 90% or more. If one resets the black vote to the norm of earlier elections, Hillary Clinton is the nominee. . . .

Hillary Clinton, who now resembles the robot’s crawling hand in the final scenes of “The Terminator,” can plausibly argue to the superdelegates that much of this is electoral bunk. In Indiana, her share of the white vote to his, men and women combined, was 60-40, a huge lead. In North Carolina, 61-37.

They won’t buy it. Ever. . . . The Democratic superdelegates are products of their party – nice liberals, nice people. To stiff Obama’s black voters at this late hour, most of the superdelegates would have to be as hard and clinical about politics as the Clintons. They aren’t.

Read the whole thing, including this conclusion: “If John McCain can’t talk the American people out of re-Carterizing themselves, what has he been preparing for all these years?”

CONN CARROLL: Why are liberals actively helping terrorists?

I SAW A FEATURE BY NEIL CAVUTO last night on food stockpiling, in which one of his correspondents explained how he’d spent $1500 at Costco stocking up against shortages. You know, if you have stories like this on TV regularly, you’ll get food shortages at stores even if there’s no actual shortage in supply, because today’s just-in-time inventory practices mean that there’s no real slack for sudden increases in demand. The empty shelves will then promote panic and more stockpiling, setting the stage for the equivalent of a bank-run on grocery stores even if there’s no actual reason. I’m all for people keeping a good-sized supply of food at home in case of emergencies, but press people who cover this need to do so responsibly.

On the other hand, if they create a crisis, then they can report on the crisis. Your media at work!

BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH: Too little sleep — or too much. It’s not really clear, though, whether health problems lead to sleep problems or vice versa. Also, too much or too little sleep is associated with obesity.

IPHONE 2.0: The song remains the same.

OKAY, SO I’VE GOT THE NEW HP Mini-Note 9″ laptop, which I’ll be reviewing for Popular Mechanics. It’s pretty cool — only slightly bigger than the Asus, but with a better keyboard and full-scale features and much handsomer — but beyond that I’ll wait for the PM piece to provide a review. So far I’ve been using it for less than a day.

But I wanted to put a word processor on it, and I didn’t want to go digging for my USB CD drive (the HP is bigger than the Asus, but too little to have its own optical drive), so I just downloaded OpenOffice instead, since I’d been meaning to give it a try anyway. I used OpenOffice’s word processor to write my review of Ron Paul’s book, and I have to say I really liked it. It’s easy and intuitive, and it’s much, much closer to my beloved WordPerfect than to Word. Also, it’s free. I’d have to try it on something really long, like a law review article with lots of footnotes, to be sure how I feel, but I really enjoyed my testdrive. Using Word always feels like work. Using OpenOffice just felt like writing. And did I mention it’s free?

UPDATE: More on OpenOffice from Bill Quick, who likes it. And reader Steven Sullivan emails:

I put out a few biomedical literature reviews per year, generally with 80-90 references each, and OpenOffice handles those nicely. It was a little tricky getting it to use Arabic numerals with endnotes at first, but once I figured that out it ran very smoothly. And of course, it distills PDFs of your documents perfectly with one button. There are some things it’s difficult to get OpenOffice to do (e.g. full-bleed page backgrounds, linking complex or altered pagination to TOCs) but there are workarounds.

I still deal with completely unstable Word documents all the time, generally with heavy use of Styles and with comments and edits in track changes — they get corrupted, they crash the application, etc. I’ve never had an OpenOffice document behave that way.

Hopefully the feds will allow OpenDocument as a standard so small businesses like mine won’t have to shell out money to Mr. Gates just to do business with our own government.

If you ever do any desktop publishing you might want to look at Scribus.

So what will Microsoft be selling in 5 years?

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here.

CAPTAIN’S JOURNAL: Ending Iran’s Influence Inside Iraq.

THE HARMONIC CONVERGENCE OF IDIOCY CONTINUES: Code Pink Protesters Try Witchcraft at Anti-Marine Rallies.

MICKEY KAUS OFFERS a two-factor explanation for the Democratic primary results.

UPDATE: More thoughts from Robert Novak: “Buyer’s remorse was beginning to afflict supporters of Barack Obama before Tuesday’s primary election returns showed he had delivered a knockout punch against Hillary Clinton. The young orator who had seemed so fantastic, beginning with his 2007 Jefferson-Jackson dinner speech in Iowa, disappointed even his own advisers over the past two weeks, and old party hands mourned that they were stuck with a flawed candidate. . . . Clinton’s failure Tuesday was a product of demographics rather than Obama’s campaign skill. Consistently winning more than 90 percent of the African American vote, Obama is unbeatable in a primary where the black electorate is as large as it is in North Carolina (half the registered Democratic vote there). Indiana differed from seemingly similar Ohio and Pennsylvania, where Clinton scored big wins, because it borders Obama’s state of Illinois and many of its voters live in the Chicago media market.” Plus he got a lot of help from Lake County. On the other hand, Hillary got a lot of help from Rush Limbaugh, so maybe it evens out . . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: More on Indiana from Rishawn Biddle: “The biggest mistake by Clinton was in presuming that Indiana was like just another Rust Belt state. The reality is that it is a microcosm of the entire nation, with the almost all the same socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. In some ways, its combination of rural and urban gives it more of a resemblance to nearby Illinois or New York than Ohio or Iowa. “

A MEDIA COUP IN LEBANON: HEZBOLLAH’S SUBTLE TAKEOVER: “Hezbollah’s militant takeover of Beirut and its systematic destruction of the authority of the state and freedom of the press suggests a sophisticated and planned campaign to take power. There is no hiding the violence Hezbollah used to seize Beirut and cut it off from the rest of the country. But as their media campaign is already showing, Hezbollah is employing subtle and sophisticated mechanisms to take over the rest of Lebanon.” And, of course, Iran and Syria are the real puppet-masters here.

GOOD NEWS: PRIVATE SPACE STATION HITS ORBITAL MILESTONE:

A prototype module for a private space station has passed an orbital milestone after completing its 10,000th trip around the Earth.

Genesis 1, an inflatable module built by the Las Vegas, Nev.-based firm Bigelow Aerospace, passed the 10,000-orbit mark as it nears the beginning of its third year of unmanned operations, its builders announced late Thursday.

Bigelow Aerospace launched Genesis 1 atop a converted intercontinental ballistic missile on July 12, 2006 to test its ability to self-inflate and operate in Earth orbit.

Now, more 660 days later, the spacecraft’s exterior cameras have taken some 14,000 images that include snapshots of all seven of Earth’s continents. Its solar panels have also continuously powered electrical systems for about 15,840 hours, Bigelow Aerospace officials said.

Very promising.

AND RIGHTLY SO: UN blasts Myanmar for visa policy on aid workers.

A GROWING MEASLES OUTBREAK in Toronto.

LARRY JOHNSON: The Obama Democrats’ Ostrich Moment. “The full-court press to force Hillary from the presidential race ain’t working. She will win the West Virginia, Kentucky, and Puerto Rico primaries.”

IN CANADA, MORE PUSHBACK AGAINST THEIR KANGAROO-COURT “HUMAN RIGHTS” COMMISSIONS:

Once upon a time, it was simply a pain in the butt.

For the last two years, though, the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) has become an out-of-control juggernaut, rolling over unsuspecting bystanders in its path.

Fair enough, OHRC has always been a tad controversial — some might say off-the-wall — in its rulings.

But recent changes, and the way they are being implemented by Commissioner Barbara Hall, are pitting human rights protection against our fundamental rights to freedom of speech and freedom of religion. . . .

Attorney General Chris Bentley and Premier Dalton McGuinty should rein Hall in before she tramples every right we hold dear.

Indeed.

TURNING GLOOMY, WINDOWLESS PRISONS into light and airy space!

GATEWAY PUNDIT HAS MORE ON THE AL-MASRI ARREST, including this: “There are reports that al-Masri set up terrorist training camps in Iraq after he fled Afghanistan when the Taliban fell back in 2001.”

Remember how Richard Clarke was worried that Osama would “boogie to Baghdad” if we invaded Afghanistan? Well, I guess he was right to worry, in general if not in specific. . . . I guess it’s no big surprise — Saddam offered bin Laden asylum back in 1999 — but given that nowadays a lot of people pretend that any kind of cooperation between Saddam and Al Qaeda is unimaginable, it’s worth pointing out.

But don’t make too much of these reports until they’re confirmed. As Bill Roggio notes, it’s best to wait for confirmation from the U.S. military, which hasn’t happened yet.

UPDATE: And that’s good advice, because here’s a report that it wasn’t Al-Masri after all.

HAS HILLARY BECOME THE DEMOCRATS’ psycho ex-girlfriend? (Via Katie Granju).