TODAY ONLY: Thriller: The Complete Series on sale. Think Boris Karloff, not Michael Jackson.

REASON TV: Veronique de Rugy Discusses The Truth About Deficits And The Debt.

COLUMBIA VOTES to bring back ROTC.

Plus, what’s happening at Brown.

KEVIN DRUM channels Britney Spears.

Related: The Loyalty Of The Clerks.

“I ALREADY GOT YOUR MONEY, DUDE!” Charlie Sheen stage show a disaster.

UPDATE: Donna Brazile much funnier.

HMM: E.U. TO PUT BOOTS ON THE GROUND IN LIBYA? “If I’m reading that right, the EU’s mission is half Dunkirk, half Peace Corps. It also appears to be a sign that Gaddafi will get to hang around a while longer.”

JOHN PODHORETZ: Have A Rotten Eggroll, Mr. Goldstone.

CHANGE: Rasmussen: Obama approval rating continued downward trend in March.

TIM CAVANAUGH: “Job growth, despite our leadership’s best efforts, can only follow business growth, so the pickup in jobs will be different throughout the country – with Texas vs. California giving the starkest and most popular contrast between growth and stagnation. The question isn’t why we have ghost towns but why we don’t have more of them. . . . My sense of justice and order in the universe tells me Los Angeles should become America’s next ghost town, but I have a terrible feeling that won’t happen.”

MARC AMBINDER ON FACEBOOK: “My hunch is that this election will hinge on who best harnesses the gut fear that America is in decline — and turns it into real optimism.”

U.S. CANCER INCIDENCE continues to fall.

AT AMAZON, the spring automotive sale.

RICHARD GOLDSTONE confirms he was a useful idiot. “Some have suggested that it was absurd to expect Hamas, an organization that has a policy to destroy the state of Israel, to investigate what we said were serious war crimes. It was my hope, even if unrealistic, that Hamas would do so, especially if Israel conducted its own investigations. At minimum I hoped that in the face of a clear finding that its members were committing serious war crimes, Hamas would curtail its attacks. Sadly, that has not been the case.”

Prof. Jacobson comments: “The damage Richard Goldstone did was enormous. The Washington Post op-ed isn’t even a good first step at undoing the damage.”

ASSAD STATE OF AFFAIRS: Will Syria Be The Next To Fall? Well, since Obama hasn’t endorsed the opposition yet, there’s still hope. . . . .

AMONG KENYA’S EXPLODING JEWISH POPULATION:

Gathundia’s Jews are carving out their own Jewish identity, inspired by a reverence for an ancient tradition but inflected with local customs. Educating themselves and one another, many of them have become adept at Hebrew and live devoutly Jewish lives while continuing to work as subsistence farmers. They are also one of a number of small but growing Jewish communities in sub-Saharan Africa that look to Mbale, Uganda, home to the Abayudaya, as both a model and a site of pilgrimage, religious guidance, education, and even youth conventions.

One of my Nigerian relatives claims (with some pride) that the Ibo were originally Jews. I found the evidence rather thin, but given the spread of antisemitism worldwide, it’s interesting to see people not sharing that prejudice.

GUN RIGHTS: Brannon Denning and I have a piece on what the McDonald v. Chicago case means. Download early and often! (Bumped).

THE NEW CIVILITY: Conservative Think Tank Receives Bomb Threats After Michigan FOIAs. My prediction: There will be more mainstream media outrage over the FOIA requests than over the bomb threats.

THE HILL: A “Tea Party” Budget.

NARRATIVE FAIL (CONT’D): U.S. Embassy Cables: 90 Percent of Mexican Drug Cartels’ Most Lethal Weapons Come From Central America–Not USA.

Of course, we’re still trying to figure out just how many of the weapons that do reach Mexico via the United States get there with the connivance of the ATF.

MORE ON THAT UCLA WHISTLEBLOWER-FIRING SCANDAL:

On Thursday, I wrote about Dr. James Enstrom, an environmental sciences professor and researcher at UCLA who blew the whistle on a fraud at the California Air Resources Board. Enstrom started looking into what he thought was a less-than-rigorous study that attempted to link fine particulate emissions from diesel engines to 2,000 “premature deaths” in the state, and discovered that the lead author, “Dr.” Hien Tran, had received his diploma from Thornhill University instead of UC Davis, which Tran’s CV had claimed. The school colors of Thornhill University, as it turns out, are brown and brown — UPS brown, because the entire school fit into a mailbox in one of their stores. Tran, it turns out, bought his PhD from a diploma mill.

Enstrom blew the whistle on Tran, but Mary Nichols, chair of CARB and a UCLA law professor, hid the fraud from the board until after the regulations had been approved. Enstrom also pointed out that John Froines, another environmental sciences professor at UCLA, had served on the scientific advisory panel for far longer than the charter allowed, where members were supposed to serve for short periods of time to avoid dogmatic thinking. When the dust had settled, everyone kept their jobs — except for Enstrom, whom UCLA fired for a changing set of reasons.

Enstrom will meet with University of California chancellor Gene Block on Monday to start the appeal of his dismissal, but that may not be the last word. According to FIRE, which has come to Enstrom’s defense, twelve members of the state Assembly have warned Block that they will hold public hearings into the UC system’s handling of academic freedom if Enstrom’s termination is not rescinded.

As they should. A cynic might suggest, of course, that notions of academic freedom were developed in the first half of the 20th century largely in order to protect communists from being fired, and that since Enstrom isn’t a communist, academic freedom shouldn’t apply . . . .

LEO RASKIND HAS DIED. He was a visiting professor at Tennessee some years ago, and we were very happy to have him around.

SOFTWARE FOR browsing the web anonymously.

JIM GERAGHTY: Our Workforce Lost 2.33 Million People in One Year? “If you remove 2.33 million people from the labor force within one year, that will indeed help lower the unemployment rate. It is, however, not the same as helping the unemployed find jobs.”

SHOULD PROFESSORS be political?

LITTLE MISS ATTILA TO STACY MCCAIN: Mmmm, Stacy–That Was Great!