ANOTHER CORPORATE SCANDAL:

Insiders at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) say the agency is probing claims that CNN, MSNBC and network news operations routinely hype interviews, reports and talk shows they know are losers, while top executives privately watch reruns on Nickelodeon, or go out to Red Lobster with the family.

“Much like the SEC investigation into corporate execs who made rosy projections while privately selling off millions in stock, this probe seeks to determine if news editors and producers know that some of their on-air material will be a waste of viewers’ time,” according to the unnamed source. “Clearly, for instance, MSNBC knew that the new Donahue show was a dog, but they continued to promote it like it was the next Bill O’Reilly or something. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

They’ve got those guys dead to rights. I hope they throw away the key.

THE JURIST, which is a very cool law-related site that I should have plugged earlier, has a list of blogs relating to the law. It leaves out Howard Bashman and Ernie the Attorney, but it’s got some sites on it I didn’t know about. Check out the main site, too, which has all sorts of law-related news.

UPDATE: Oops. It does so include them — I just didn’t scroll down far enough. Don’t you make the same mistake.

HEINLEIN UPDATE: It’s scrolled, so you might miss the updates to this post without this pointer.

BELLESILES UPDATE: A reader points out that a piece Bellesiles had written for the Emory academic website on January 22 has apparently been pulled. The piece was entitled “Bellesiles Further Responds to Critics, Says He Has Located Missing San Francisco Records.” Trouble was, those turned out not to be the records after all, and drew a rather testy response from the Contra Costa Historical Society where he said the records were found. (Here’s a news story that quotes Bellesiles’ now-missing piece, and the response from the archivist.)

I’ve gotten a lot of email from readers angrily suggesting that Emory is just trying to sweep the whole matter under the rug. The disappearance of this item might support that — but it certainly suggests that someone at Emory recognizes that there is a problem.

TED TURNER NUCLEAR UPDATE: (Gee, using the words “Ted Turner” and “nuclear” in the same sentence is a bit disturbing. . . .) InstaPundit’s consulting nuclear physicist (a former IAEA inspector who prefers to remain nameless here) sends this note regarding an earlier post:

You can find details of what the Serbs had at the IAEA research reactor database http://www.iaea.or.at/worldatom/rrdb/ – go to Yugoslavia and look up RA-B. Its fuel was 80% enriched UO2 – since this was the enrichment of the Hiroshima bomb uranium you would have to say that it was “weapons grade” even though real modern weapons use material at 93% or better.

Most research reactors were originally designed to use high enriched uranium (HEU – note it is not Highly Enriched Uranium but just High Enriched Uranium). The US, the IAEA and other countries (such as Australia) have a long running program called the RERTR to reduce the enrichment of uranium in research reactors, so most new reactors use fuel at 20% instead.

One minor quibble – you don’t enrich plutonium – no macro scale enrichment program for Pu enrichment has ever worked. You just try to produce it without too many higher isotopes. As to the facility you were referring to – it is more correctly called a critical assembly than a reactor.

Reader Norman Yarvin writes:

The Osirak reactor used 93% enriched uranium.

Yes, that’s right: Iraq was shipped enough weapons-grade uranium to build a bomb — and the Iraqis still have it, according to Khidir Hamza; they recovered it from the ruins of the reactor. (To be exact, he claims they have twelve kilograms of 93% enriched uranium, and fourteen kilograms of 80%, all from Osirak.)

The source for all this is Hamza’s book “Saddam’s Bombmaker.”

Reader Ian Wood adds:

According to WaPo, the U.S. government paid $2 million for transportation and related costs, Yugoslavia provided 1,200 troops for escort, and The Nuclear Threat Initiative, the nonprofit group co-founded by former Senator Sam Nunn and Ted Turner, pledged $5 million. That money is going to help clean up the area around the reactor site itself (including the removal of two tons of nuclear waste–*not* the enriched uranium), as well as help to pay some of the scientists at the Vinca research reactor facility. Russia will reprocess the enriched uranium slugs at its facility in Dimitrovgrad.

So, us taxpayers paid for the removal and transport of the problematic nuclear material, which I’m happy to kick in for. Private money will clean up the radioactive mess left by the Communists and give impoverished nuclear physicists less incentive to go work for, say, Iraq.

More evidence of the corrupt values instilled by capitalism, I suppose.

No doubt.

JUST ABOUT A YEAR AGO, I reported Department of Justice figures showing that one American in 32 was under supervision by the criminal justice system, and remarked:

How many people have to be under direct supervision of law enforcement before you have a police state? Whatever the number is, at the current rate of growth it won’t take us long to get there. According to these DOJ figures one out of 32 American adults — over three percent of the population — is in jail, on parole, or on probation. This represents a whopping forty-nine percent increase over the last ten years. Most of this growth appears to come from nonviolent drug offenses. Another example of how the Drug War is leading — in this case directly, not metaphorically — to the creation of a police state.

Okay, I don’t want to go over the top. But really — prisons are hellholes for the most part. And some people deserve to be in hellholes. But not all that many. Certainly not this many. I think that future historians will look back on this mass imprisonment the way we look on the internment of Japanese-American citizens in World War Two.

That still stands — and it’s a bigger, though far less remarked-upon, injustice than any that are involved in the War on Terrorism.

TalkLeft has this year’s figures, which unsurprisingly aren’t any better. I guess I should be glad they aren’t worse.

PUNDITWATCH IS UP!

VIA REBECCA BLOOD, I note that there’s a weblog called The Daily Summit set up to cover the Johannesburg sustainability conference. (Kentucky Fried Chicken has a “special World Summit menu!”) TechCentralStation will be providing regular updates, too.

UPDATE: Meryl Yourish emails:

By the way, they’re talking about “Sustainable development,” and yet not a word of Mugabe starving his own people. Deliberately. I’m shocked, shocked I say.

Yeah, me too.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Robert Prather reports that Mugabe will be speaking at the Summit. Protests are expected.

I’M CURRENTLY LISTENING TO A GREAT CD BY FLOOR CREAK, a band featuring Dave Shiflett, best known to most InstaPundit readers for his writing at National Review Online, but a hell of an acoustic guitar player, too. (Dave plays acoustic through a Fender Super Reverb, which is the secret to the Nebraska Guitar Militia’s sound, too — though the Super Reverb used by NGM usually has the tremolo controls set on “11”). Very nice stuff.

THIS PALESTINIAN SAYS THAT HE WAS TORTURED UNTIL HE FALSELY IMPLICATED HIS MOTHER as a collaborator, after which she was killed by Palestinian authorities.

And yet it’s Israel that gets nearly all the attention from “human rights” groups.

UPDATE: Charles Johnson has a photo of the murdered woman during her coerced “confession” just before her murder. (Note the mattress as backdrop). He reports that the Reuters caption says she was “testifying.”

NORAH VINCENT says that we should look to Pakistan before Iraq. I don’t think I agree (I think we should look to Saudi Arabia before Iraq) but her thoughts are worth reading.

UPDATE: Suman Palit responds.

BILL HERBERT REPORTS on the anti-war demonstration on the Mall.

UPDATE: Here’s more.

ANOTHER UPDATE: These guys blame “Anti-Racist Action” for the violence. (This site, Overthrow.com, calls itself “Libertarian Socialist,” — whatever that’s supposed to mean — but it’s a lefty anarchist site, basically.) I had a post on ARA earlier. Their chief talent lies in making Nazis look like sympathetic victims. Way to go, guys.

BRITAIN: Slouching toward revolution? Well, probably not. On the other hand, the Petrol Protests indicate that there’s more pent-up resentment than is generally acknowledged.

MATT WELCH says that former U.S. ambassadors to Saudi Arabia have become corrupt shills for an enemy regime: “If you closed your eyes, you would think the person talking held a Saudi passport.”

THE FBI (as long-term InstaPundit readers will know) let an innocent man (actually, several innocent men) languish in prison for 30 years to protect a murderous informant. Now it’s being sued for $300 million.

That’s good, but this demonstrated lack of ethics in law enforcement makes me doubt the FBI is up to its homeland security mission.

TIMES ARE TOUGH, but the CNN/Time-Warner folks are exploiting synergy.

MORE SCOWCROFT-DISSING:

That leaves the wise old foreign policy owls. When it comes to unsavoury foreigners, Eagleburger, Scowcroft and Kissinger are all famously “realist”, though there’s a fine line between realism and inertia. A decade ago, Brent Scowcroft advised Bush, Sr to stick with Gorbachev and the preservation of the Soviet Union over Yeltsin and a democratic Russia.

Last autumn, he argued in favour of leaving the Taliban in power. Inevitably Scowcroft now supports letting Saddam be because, if we start a war, “We could have an explosion in the Middle East. It could turn the whole region into a cauldron.”

He says that like it’s a bad thing.

HERE’S SOMETHING that Bush should be asking our “Saudi friends” about:

KABUL (Reuters) – International peacekeepers said on Sunday Afghan police had found a store of chemicals in a house in Kabul formerly occupied by a Saudi non-governmental organization, and local media reports called it a terrorist laboratory.

But where would they have gotten the money for something like that?

UPDATE: Here’s more.

IS THE LEFT CHANNELING ROBERT HEINLEIN? That’s what Andrew Stuttaford is asking over at The Corner:

One of the more peculiar notions to emerge in the last few weeks has been the suggestion by the Left that only those who are – or who have been – in the military have the moral authority to commit the nation to war.

It’s a zany, profoundly undemocratic argument and it also sounds like something out of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (a book liberals often criticize as ‘fascist’ ) a novel in which, if I recall correctly, the only people entitled to full citizenship were those who had completed a period of military service.

What’s next? Will liberals be calling for our rule by a dynasty of warrior kings?

Well said.

UPDATE: Stuttaford’s gotten the same email I have on this one, reminding him that Heinlein’s scheme allowed non-military service, too. He’s even got the relevant passage quoted in an update over at The Corner.

MORE ON HEINLEIN: Here’s a link to a paper on military service/civil service in Starship Troopers, with all the relevant passages from the book excerpted.

STILL MORE: Jeff Cooper sensibly distinguishes between moral authority and military expertise, saving me the trouble of writing a post doing so, which I had planned to get around to sometime.

HEY — Asparagirl is off to see The New Deal play live. I just got their CD this week, and I’m jealous.

THIS MONTH’S SMARTER HARPER’S INDEX is up.

JIM BENNETT WRITES ABOUT TRANSNATIONAL PROGRESSIVISM in this week’s UPI column.

I JUST SAW THIS OPED BY BILL KELLER IN THE NEW YORK TIMES. Note the lead:

If candor counted for as much as courtesy, the author note under Brent Scowcroft’s now famous op-ed in The Wall Street Journal last week, the one arguing against war with Iraq, might have said something like this: “Mr. Scowcroft, the former national security adviser, now makes his living advising business clients, some of whom would be gravely inconvenienced by a war in the Middle East. And by the way, he thought Saddam Hussein was finished after the gulf war in 1991.”

And it gets better. It’s basically a full-bore Fisking of the antiwar critics, which is pretty remarkable in the Times.

UPDATE: Mickey Kaus points out that Keller was the contender beaten out by Howell Raines. The Times, I think it’s safe to say, would be a lot better paper if Keller had gotten the job.

MORE on the mideast connection to the Oklahoma City bombing. I’m still filing this in the “not proven, but worth looking into” category. But I’m glad people are looking into it.

THE UNITED STATES HAS FIVE PERCENT OF THE WORLD’S POPULATION, BUT. . . well, read this.