BOGUS ETHICS-CLAIM ALERT: Dave Kopel is under fire because the tagline at the end of his Rocky Mountain News media criticism column doesn’t mention that he works for the Independence Institute, which receives tobacco money.

Ho hum. Paul Krugman’s tagline doesn’t mention that he got Enron money, and the media-ethics watchdogs haven’t been too hot on that. And despite his truth-in-blogging campaign, Mickey Kaus still hasn’t disclosed that he’s really a Rhinoceros. In the interest of full disclosure, though, I should disclose the following:

(1) Although Kopel and I have never actually met, we’ve coauthored law-review articles and op-eds together (including one on the rave issue), thanks to the miracle of the Internet; and

(2) Though I included a tagline with my latest FoxNews column criticizing Joe Biden’s dumb RAVE Act that disclosed this, Fox went with the usual one instead. It should have said:

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee and produces the techno band Mobius Dick.

Big whoop. These sorts of charges are what Peter Morgan and I called “Petty Blifil” in our book The Appearance of Impropriety: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business and Society — the use of trivial ethics charges as a means of discrediting someone whose real crime is disagreement with the maker of the charges. (The “Blifil” part is from Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones, which has striking resonances for today’s political environment).

Special bonus deepthink point: All the stuff disclosed above is discoverable in moments on Google. (Here, for example, is what you get when you search “Dave Kopel.” Actually, I think you could find all that stuff out just by following links from this page.) Does the wide availability of Google reduce the obligation to affirmatively disclose potential conflicts of interest when anyone can find out about someone’s affiliations, etc., with very little effort anyway?

UPDATE: I should also disclose — in light of my oft-expressed hostility to the House of Saud — that East Tennessee is poised to become a rival oil producer:

According to Pryor, the drillers encountered oil pressures at 2,500 feet underground that they would not normally expect to find at less than 10,000 feet. The well’s flow rate was calculated at 12,000 barrels of oil in the first 24 hours with a flowing casing pressure of 1,750 pounds per square inch.

“This is a huge well for anywhere in the United States, but dwarfs anything ever discovered in Tennessee,” Pryor said.

Oil. Black gold. Texas tea. I may go out on the back 40 and see if I can pull a Jed Clampett.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Hesiod Theogeny emails that Douglas Adams was a Rhino, too! Hmm. With company like that, maybe I should be convert to Rhinism myself.

STILL ANOTHER UPDATE: Hey, I was joking about the oil and conflicts of interest, but it turns out that one of my environmental-law colleagues, nationally known as a big green, owns some land very close to that well. “I’m sure there are environmentally friendly ways to extract the oil,” he said. I think he was joking. . . .

OKAY, THIS IS THE LAST UPDATE, I PRACTICALLY PROMISE: Kaus is reporting on a deal between The American Prospect and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that sounds, well, a lot fishier than anything Kopel’s been accused of. Will it make Romenesko?

WELL, MAYBE THIS WILL BE THE LAST: Here’s a piece on the comprehensiveness of Google that supports my observation above.