STEPHEN SCHWARTZ: “The French and British have deliberately ignored many opportunities to rationally deal with the issues posed by Euro-Islam.”

IF YOU’RE A LAW PROFESSOR CANDIDATE who will be interviewing at the AALS “meat market” this week, be sure to read this advice, which is pretty good. Here’s one tip I think is worth stressing: “Despite the fact that this is a ruthlessly competitive environment, be courteous to absolutely everyone you meet. In the best of all worlds, you will get the law faculty appointment of your dreams, and you can put the meat market unpleasantness safely behind you. Still, your scholarly reputation across the profession will begin at the Marriott Wardman. You will encounter many of your interviewers and many of your fellow candidates in the future, as colleagues at other law schools. Give each of them every reason to respect you when they see you or hear about you again.”

You’ll meet a lot of people at the conference, and a surprising number will remember you years later. Be sure that’s a plus, regardless!

HEY, ARNOLD: THE CARNIVAL OF ARNOLD IS UP!

And, yes, it’s this Arnold, rather than the other one.

It’s not this one, either, though I can imagine him in a carnival . . . .

OVER AT SINCE SLICED BREAD, an ideablog where I’m guest-blogging periodically, I’ve got an idea for energy efficiency that’s, at least, better than the usual nostrum of tightening CAFE standards.

SOME GOOD NEWS for Daniel Drezner, and for the Fletcher School!

“CHIRAC VOWS ORDER AS FRENCH RIOTS SPREAD:” I was wondering if the blogosphere was making too much of this, but now I’m pretty sure the answer is no. Note the reference to other European nations being “unnerved.” (Maybe they should offer to send troops. It’s supposed to be the European Union, right?) Earlier roundup here, or just scroll down.

TORNADOBLOGGING at The Agora.

Are natural disasters increasing? Apparently not.

ANOTHER FRAUDULENT ANTI-WAR VETERAN? Looks like it. After Micah Wright, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.

At the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Ron Harris asks: Why did the press swallow Massey’s stories? I think we know.

Looking on the bright side, Bruce Kesler says that these guys get exposed a lot faster than they used to. As Ken Layne put it, we can “Fact-check your ass.”

SHOOTING FISH IN A BARREL — with a machine gun.

MARK TAPSCOTT THINKS that Karl Rove’s usefulness has come to an end:

For the past two weeks, Congress has been roiled by a conservative revolt demanding that billions of dollars worth of pork barrel projects approved in the transportation appropriations bill earlier this year instead be used to pay for hurricane recovery on the Gulf coast.

Senate votes forced by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK, and public attention generated by the Porkbusters campaign in the Blogosphere have exposed the hypocrisy of Congress and its putting Members’ selfish political interests ahead of the national and humanitarian interests.

That exposure creates a giant opportunity for the President to seize the political high ground and effectively challenge Congress to get back on track enacting needed reforms, starting with getting federal spending under control and making storm recovery a vivid national demonstration project of the power of individual choice.

But it’s an opportunity not taken. Instead, the White House goes on with mixed messages, a defensive crouch and hardly even a peep of protest when Senate Democrats manhandle the GOP “majority” into delaying Judge Alito’s Supreme Court confirming hearing to next year.

It seems clear now that Karl Rove is indeed preoccupied with defending himself in the Plamegate scandal and avoiding indictment by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. That means Rove can’t do what he has always done – keep Bush and the administration focused and moving forward on the basis of a coherent, aggressive political strategy.

I don’t know if he’s right, but I think that there are no essential people, only essential ideas. The Bush Administration seems short of the latter these days.

A WHILE BACK, I mentioned my law school classmate Gene Sperling’s new book, The Pro-Growth Progressive: An Economic Strategy for Shared Prosperity. (Perhaps more significantly than having been my law school classmate, he was also National Economic Advisor and head of the National Economic Council under President Clinton).

Sperling will be debating economic policy over at the TPMCafe book club starting tomorrow. It’s important to recognize this book, and debate, for what it is: An effort to recapture the debate over economic policy from the anti-growth types who dominate economic discussion on the left these days, something that has huge importance for the 2008 campaign. Although I don’t agree with all the specifics in Sperling’s book — about which I’ll be writing more later — he’s got the most important part right. Economic growth is good, and it’s actually especially beneficial for those at the bottom of the economic ladder.

HERE’S MORE on jailed Egyptian blogger Abdolkarim Nabil Seliman.

MICKEY KAUS: “It’s not that NBC’s ‘reporters’ aren’t telling the whole story. They aren’t even telling the minimal, basic gist of the story that others are telling. It’s getting cult-like and creepy!”

UPDATE: Reader Fletcher Hudson emails:

It’s not that Russert is telling a minimal story to the public, he negotiated a deal to tell only a minimal story to the FBI investigator who took his “statement”. This “statement” serves as the credited version of the false statement alleged in the indictment.

Had he been a mere blogger, not a journalist, he may have been required to give a complete account that may not have differed that much from Libby’s. On the day of the indictment , I heard Russert tell Brian Williams that the FBI interview lasted only 20 Minutes and that he only answered two questions. Without saying what those questions were, he said that he told the FBI that did not ask Libby if he knew “Plame”, Wilson’s wife, worked at the CIA. And that he did not receive a leak from Libby. As a former federal investigator ( after UT Law’ 63) , it’s hard to believe this part of the indictment can be based on so little.

It’s interesting that Fitzgerald was willing to accept such narrow limits.

CLIVE DAVIS has a review of David Kline and Dan Burstein’s new book, Blog!: How the World of Blogs And Bloggers Is Changing Our Culture. I haven’t read the book, but the review’s worth your time.

Best line quoted from the book: “Blogs are good for companies that are good, and bad for companies that are bad.”

VICTORIA TOENSING’S WSJ COLUMN on Wilson/Plame is now a free link at OpinionJournal.

MORE PORK-BARREL PUSHBACK:

You have to wonder about Republicans’ state of mind of late. Did they wake up one morning and confront an unfamiliar face in the mirror? Like some bad political Botox, gone is Ronald Reagan’s face; staring back in his place is Teddy “I will spend your money like a drunken sailor” Kennedy.

Republicans are knee-deep pork barrelers practicing the fine art of fiscal irresponsibility. Who passes the baton that began with Goldwater, took root with Reagan and gained power through the “Contract with America”?

Contrary to popular belief, the core of conservatism does not spring from “life” issues; those just suck up all of the air and make all of the noise. Conservatives are, first and foremost, proponents of limiting government’s power and strengthening national defense.

Ouch.

Meanwhile, pork makes the cover of Parade Magazine.

JEFF JARVIS NOTES more bad news for the newspaper industry.

RIOTS SPREAD FROM PARIS to other French cities:

Hundreds of young people, including teenagers as young as 13, have been detained in the past 24 hours. Although the police have been unable to stop the violence because of its apparent spontaneity and lack of clear leaders, officials say they have also begun to detect efforts to coordinate action and spread it nationally. In remarks on Europe 1 Radio, the prosecutor general in Paris, Yves Bot, said Web sites were urging youths in other cities to join the rioting. . . .

“The republican integration model, on which France has for decades based its self-perception, is in flames,” the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung declared. An editorial in Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung called the violence around Paris an “intifada at the city gates,” a reference to the anti-Israeli uprising by Palestinians.

I hope that I’m wrong, but I’m afraid that this will get worse before it gets better.

UPDATE: More evidence for the “getting worse” analysis, from ¡No Pasarán!

Michael Lotus, meanwhile, offers some big-picture analysis.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s a troubling report from The Telegraph:

Police last night found a petrol bomb factory in a southern suburb of Paris, on France’s tenth and worst consecutive night of violence.

Jean-Marie Huet, the Justice Ministry’s director of criminal affairs and pardons, said the Police found: “150 bottles prepared for use as Molotov cocktails, of which 50 were ready to be used,” and “tens of litres of gasoline and hoods”.

Saturday night’s rioting was the most destructive so far as 1,300 vehicles were set alight and 349 people arrested, despite an enhanced police presence. . . .

Cars were burned out in the historic centre of Paris for the first time on Saturday night. In the normally quiet Normandy town of Evreux, a shopping mall, 50 vehicles, a post office and two schools went up in flames.

An extra 2,300 police officers have been drafted in across the country but the unrest has shown no sign of abating. Authorities have struggled address a problem with complex social, economic and racial causes.

Austin Bay has more on this, including this observation:

Shops, gyms, nursery schools, and cars. That’s a broad target list. In Torcy a police station and a youth center suffered attacks. Attacks have also been reported in Cannes and Nice– so tourists, beware.

Poverty exacerbates all problems, but poverty in and of itself does not produce violence. Migrants from France’s former Muslim colonies initially came for jobs, not to assimilate or “become French.” But the migrants stayed. Now France’s “Muslim neighborhoods” are permanent “cultural islands.” The French government’s own duplicitous policy towards Salafist/Islamist terror has backfired.

Read the whole thing. I think this is also support for Mickey Kaus’s welfare-causes-terrorism theory.

MORE: Roger Simon has another sad email from Paris:

I am absolutely astounded at the failure of this government to attack the problem of the riots. I don’t see it as being primarily an issue of religion, but a turf war by drug criminals, who happen to be of muslim extraction. But the failure of the government to nip this in the bud has now opened the door for players who do have a religious agenda. Mid-week I was cautiously optimistic about the situation. Now I’m very pessimistic.

Ugh. If you missed it before, be sure to read this report from Joel Shepherd in Paris.

MORE: Further thoughts from Clive Davis, who warns against making too much of these riots, and from Brussels Journal, who thinks the riots stem not from anger, but contempt: “It is not anger that is driving the insurgents to take it out on the secularised welfare states of Old Europe. It is hatred. Hatred caused not by injustice suffered, but stemming from a sense of superiority. The ‘youths’ do not blame the French, they despise them.”

ShrinkWrapped says that commentators misunderstand the rioters’ grievances: “Finally, even if quiet can be restored to the ghettos, it will be a mere interregnum; nothing will have been settled and the unsustainable quasi-stability will be, necessarily, short-lived.” Well, that’s cheerful.

Mark Steyn:

For half a decade, French Arabs have been carrying on a low-level intifada against synagogues, kosher butchers, Jewish schools, etc. The concern of the political class has been to prevent the spread of these attacks to targets of more, ah, general interest. They seem to have lost that battle. Unlike America’s Europhiles, France’s Arab street correctly identified Chirac’s opposition to the Iraq war for what it was: a sign of weakness.

Read the whole, rather pessimistic, thing.

Pieter Dorsmann: “The bitter irony is that rather than having his troops deployed in the Middle East, the French president may now need them at home.”

The E.U. Referendum blog, meanwhile, reports that “things are stirring across the Continent.”

FAMILY OF DEAD MARINE upset with New York Times. But only for hijacking his death in service of crass political ends.

UPDATE: Tim Blair: “Perhaps Starr’s family should camp outside of the NYT’s building until the editor agrees to meet them. How long might he hold out against the family’s moral authority?”

HERE’S A PETITION FROM THE COMMITTEE TO PROTECT BLOGGERS, “asking the Egyptian Interior ministry to free Abdolkarim Nabil Seliman, currently in an Egyptian jail for his critical blogging.” There are several others that are worth your attention, too.

STRATEGYPAGE has more on the Muslim riots in France, Denmark, and elsewhere:

Many of the Moslem migrants, who began to appear in large numbers four decades ago, have not assimilated. Europe has long tolerated this, partly because of a belief in “Multiculturalism” and partly because Europe does not have a tradition of assimilation. This is in stark contrast to the United States, where the “melting pot,” while often operating more like a salad bowl, still results in far less ghettoization than is found in Europe. Another advantage America has is that, in many parts of the country, there are so many migrants that “everyone is a minority.” In Europe, homogeneity is preferred, and those who do not conform, are simply tolerated (and sometimes not) as “outsiders in residence.” That’s where the concept of “ghetto” came from in the first place. The ghetto is quite common the world over, but much less so in America. . . .

After September 11, 2001, when European intelligence agencies took a real close look at their Moslem populations, they were shocked at the percentage that approved of, or supported, Islamic terrorism. It was as high as ten percent in some countries. It was higher among the young, and often unemployed, Moslem males. The riots currently underway in France, Denmark and Britain are all an extension of that. No one has a solution to the problem, except to arrest the hard cases and try to make nice to everyone else. If that doesn’t work, the fires will spread.

Let’s hope it works, then. Ralf Goergens has thoughts, too. So does Shannon Love.

UPDATE: Related thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here.

PETER INGEMI is claiming prescience for some comments about France and Islamists from 2002.

AN EMAIL FROM DENMARK, via Judith Klinghoffer.

MISREPRESENTATION FROM THE BRADY CAMPAIGN: Pretty much a dog-bites-man story, but still worth noting.

TODAY WAS HELEN’S Heartwalk, so we got up and moving earlier than usual for a Saturday and headed down to the World’s Fair site, where there were several thousand other heart patients and their families. The weather wasn’t great, but it was good enough.

The T-shirt Helen is wearing here is for people who have implantable defibrillators — they’ve all had their heart stopped (at least) as part of the testing process when those are installed.

I may post some more photos later. We’re at my mother’s house now, watching my grandmother so that my mom can go up to my brother’s for my nephew’s first birthday party. Unlike Megan McArdle, I do have Internet access, but I don’t have a cookie recipe to share.

UPDATE: She’s posted more pictures on her blog.